Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

agile is fine.

The problem is the brand has been captured by consultants selling something that doesn't jive with the original ethos.

You were supposed to talk to the customers. Now you have dedicated POs that determine what the team will work on, but they're also too junior to talk to the customers. It's okay though, you have dedicated PMs that'll talk to the customers, right? Only they're typically to busy pushing a personal agenda to climb the corporate ladder to actually care.

It's cool though, we're agile so we can just change the process? Nah, there's now there's extremely prescriptive processes. Heaven forbid you don't find the hour long retrospectives, that you can't action anything from, useful.

So basically it boils down to the daily status report which ensures you a) show up on time and b) report on your commitments, and generally being forced to overcommit by committe on really short deadlines, so you can be pressured to work free overtime because apparently its your commitment?

Of course, not everyone abuses agile like this. But they don't typically advertise, sell, or even really talk about agile all that much.

I have brought up talking, like picking up the phone and saying hi, at every workplace I have ever been. The response has always been hilarious, after they also think it is “such a great idea.”

- we have sales for that

- we should see if we can get a special team for this

- let’s just email everyone a survey

From my personal Azure account, Microsoft has called me a handful of times, with a product manager and engineer on the call, just to ask about some random feature I’ve used recently. (Who I stole the idea from, btw)

Every single time, I’ve learned something that I didn’t know to look for, and they learned what my usecase was, my hardships, etc. It was a good experience for both parties. It may take awhile, but seeing some of the issues you had be resolved is also satisfying as a customer.

I’ve built small products, worked for startups etc. I get the feeling that most devs are terrified to actually talk to the customers they build for. I’m not, because of my background, but most devs don’t have that background.

I used to do this when I was leading the development of an internal tool used by a small research department. Researchers were initially using a clunky prototype that had not received any end user feedback. By meeting them regularly I was able to fix their pet peeves, add the features they needed, and remove useless stuff. Doing this for an internal tool is of course relatively easy, but ever since I have been wondering if it would work for B2B software.

I don't want to say "no true scotsman", but agile has no requirements on stand ups, schedules, or estimates.

Agile has always been extremely vague about what it is. This is at the heart of the problem.

This allows everyone to project their own desires on to it - from CEO to PM to programmer to consultant.

I get why this happened - the original consultants probably felt that defining it in a way that would alienate people (especially leaders with the budget to hire them) wouldnt be good business.

Nonetheless it led to all this. Scrum was almost worse - an attempt to be specific and regimented about process without being alienating which is how I ended up working on a project for BigBank where they asked for N story points to be delivered per month in the contract.

Ideally Id like to see some new sort of movement X that follows the heart of what agile is and isnt afraid to get specific in a way that would alienate a CEO/pm with waterfall/controlling tendencies. This way I could ask in a job interview if the companies does X or agile and get a clearer answer about wtf they do.