Understand Your Customer
Let’s focus on the next principle from the Agile Manifesto: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
What do you think this agile values statement means?
Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) once said, “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
This statement sums up the "customer-back" approach which focuses on really understanding customer needs. Being able to respond to these needs is genuinely at the heart of your competitive advantage.
So how can this be done in practice?
A deeper understanding of these customer jobs helps develop solutions that meet customer needs and create an exceptional customer experience.
The key to understanding these customer jobs is defining functional and emotional needs:
Ask yourself, “What is the problem customers want to solve?”
Ask yourself, “How do they want to feel and be perceived while completing the task?”
For example, customers may want to feel reassured or in control when booking travel arrangements, so they don’t worry about the details.
When considering emotional needs, a good tip is to consider the customer’s pains and gains.
Understanding customer needs in this way is important in placing them at the center of the agile process. In Part 1, we mentioned the need to break down the outcomes into a series of much smaller tasks to form a backlog. User stories are a great way to express these tasks or product features to ensure customer needs are represented.
Here’s a typical user story template:
“As a [persona], I want to [customer need], so that I can [customer goal or outcome].”
Let’s consider an example using Airbnb. Imagine that their development team wants to add a feature enabling customers to search for accommodations by location. They might address this need in the following user story:
“As an Airbnb customer, I want to search for properties by location, so that I can easily find apartments close to all the tourist sites.”
Expressing tasks through user stories enables the team to consider how they can best solve the problem in a way that works for customers. In the Airbnb example, the team may now design a feature that shows the availability of specific apartments on a map along with the locations of popular tourist spots.
Over to you: Can you write a user story for a product you’re working on with your team? Write the answer in your log book.
Your Turn!
Still using the example of Airbnb, try to identify the customers’ functional and emotional needs based on your experience. If you are a customer of Airbnb, think about the last time you used the platform, otherwise ask a friend who is.
What were the fundamental reasons you were using it? Write them in the “functional needs” part of the table.
What other needs were important to you? Write them in the “gains.”
What might have prevented you from a good experience with Airbnb (customer pains)?
After filling out the template, think about how Airbnb could use this information to improve their services.
✅ Solution: You can see my answer here.
Establish Fast Customer Feedback Loops
How can customer feedback help teams develop better products, services, or campaigns? Understanding what customers think or how they use products can be a valuable tool in ensuring that a team focuses on doing what matters to users, and not just to the company.
Can you think of examples of some of the most common types of feedback a team might find useful?
Customer feedback can come in many forms, including:
Talking directly to customers and discussing their needs, motivations, and frustrations can be an excellent source of insight.
Customer surveys and research can enable teams to get more broad-based feedback.
Analytics involves looking closely at customer interaction behavior and can reveal opportunities for improvement and innovation.
Ratings and reviews are a good source of insight into what people think.
But feedback is only useful if you act on it.
These insights should determine the team’s subsequent actions, how they assess the value of the work, and how they prioritize and reprioritize backlog items. Think about this as a continuous, iterative feedback loop where the team aligns around the feedback sources, how it will be gathered and analyzed, and what will happen from the insights:
Throughout an Agile process, a team should have quick and easy access to customer feedback to help prioritize what they need to work on next. It ensures a team can stay truly adaptive while focusing on what’s important to customers.
Get Familiar With Empathy Mapping
Empathy mapping is an excellent tool for developing a deeper understanding of customer needs. Teams can focus on a particular user type or persona and visualize customer behaviors and attitudes to inform how they can best serve their needs.
An empathy map is typically a chance to focus on four key areas of customer understanding:
What are they thinking about?
What are their motivations and frustrations?
How do they feel at that moment in time?
An example might be confusion about available options when buying a computer.
Who will they be listening to?
What should influencers or friends say about your product?
An example might be getting advice from their friends or colleagues on what computers they use.
What websites or media do they look at for advice and guidance?
What will they see in the marketplace that will influence their decision?
An example could be the search engine results they see when typing in the term “best laptop computer.”
What will the customer do during the decision-making process or when using the product or service?
What will they say to other people about it?
An example might be looking through Amazon reviews of different computer models.
Remember pains and gains from earlier in this chapter? You can also include these in the empathy map to summarize the customer’s needs.
Here’s how to organize all the above elements on the empathy map:
Your Turn!
It’s your turn to create an empathy map! Annabel is a new Airbnb customer and wants to book accommodations for a weekend away in Lisbon with her partner. You could express this need in a user story as follows:
“As a new customer to Airbnb, I want to book good value accommodation easily, so that I can go away and have a lovely weekend in Lisbon.”
Now fill out an empathy map for Annabel’s persona and situation.
✅ Solution: Here’s how I completed Annabel’s empathy map.
Time to get back to your log book! What might an empathy map look like for one of your customers?
Convince Your Team to Adopt the Customer-back Working
It can be hard to get the team to think customer-back consistently. Amazon calls this “customer obsession” (see earlier in this chapter). The whole team must consider customer needs at every opportunity in their daily work. Everyone has a chance to contribute to an exceptional customer experience even if they don’t work in a directly customer-facing function, since everyone’s work in the organization will impact customers somehow.
Let’s Recap!
An agile team stays focused on customer needs throughout the Agile process, and customer understanding is critical to delivering true value to users.
Tools such as “jobs to be done” and empathy maps can ensure a deeper understanding of customer needs and help the team visualize them. Use these tools to get greater insights into your customer personas.
Expressing tasks and product features as user stories can help ensure that work is articulated in ways that keep the customer at the center.
Teams should use customer feedback throughout an Agile process to inform what they should work on next and what has the highest value to customers.
Great job! Let’s now build on this customer-first approach and mindset by ensuring a clear vision for success.
