Agile Development and the Customer Development Process

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by on July 24, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Marketing.fm

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I went to a Meetup last night called the Customer Development Process in NY where a group of entrepreneurs got together to discuss much of what Steve Blank and Eric Ries have been writing about for awhile. We also talked about agile development from an engineering standpoint.

It was a great event and the conversations and questions flowed nicely. It also helped that it was moderated well by Fraser Kelton and Kareem Kouddous.

I think its great to get a perspective from people actually building, guiding, and producing projects rather than a sales pitch on what project management or development tool to use. The best conversations come hearing about real problems, realistic solutions, and good questions based around real life usage – not a sales pitch.

My main takeaways from the night were around the right way to collect feedback and turn that into actionable items. Too many feedback sessions result in feature creep, when they should be boiled down into what would make someone use a product more, and tell their friends about it.

The idea of agile development and the process behind it is somewhat new to me as I am not a coder by trade. Using a system like PivotalTracker is a great way to start learning about the process – and I have heard of some non-coding folks using it for basic project management and tasks.

I hope to learn more about this area in the coming months, and I have heard a great place to start is with the many books and podcasts in this area.

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Posted by Eric Friedman on July 24, 2009

http://www.ericgfriedman.com/2009/07/24/agile-development-and-the-customer-development-process/

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  • http://amandapeyton.com amanda peyton

    Great write-up Eric. I'm sorry I missed this. One of my favorite quotes related to customer development comes from Henry Ford: “If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses.” I definitely think you have to listen to your customers, solve their pain, give them what they want, treat them like gold, etc. but sometimes when you try and implement every suggestion you can end up muddying your vision. as you said – “feature creep”.

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    Thanks Amanda. I think Fraser is doing this monthly so you can make the
    next one.

    That is a great quote! People don't really know the solution they need
    until it presents itself. People will “featurize” services into oblivion
    and at some point you have to stop changing things for the loudest users and
    start innovating for the silent majority.

  • http://www.frogblog.biz Fred H Schlegel

    Feature creep is a problem in all product development situations. I've been more directly connected with manufactured product rather than code and so I'm real interested to see how this discussion can transfer. While I've heard the term agile software development before, I hadn't given it the time it might deserve. The lower the cost of adding features the more likely you are going to end up suffering from this problem, so ideas being used to focus software development might be very useful.

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    It was great to hear from both sides of the fence, waterfall development vs.
    agile development and know there is a place for both. Online web
    application software development seems to benefit from agile development,
    but building and planning a construction project is a great example where a
    waterfall approach is definitely needed. You can't build a structure in a
    piece meal approach.

    I think in the physical space you can use this methodology to increase and
    make communication much more transparent. This way the engineering team is
    working in concert with the the project management team. This is especially
    needed in the physical product space because those two jobs are more distant
    as time and production plays such as role vs. web apps where the two are
    blended.

  • http://blog.superiorpromos.com/ Promotional Products

    Sounds like a great information session. I've found that I have great customer development at trade shows and conventions. I meet so many different people from potential customers to fellow business owners who are all there to develop our brand and get instant feedback from potential clients, I always seem to have a great time.

  • jual_rumah

    As a marketer I find a few new term in this post. I think I need more study and real clue.

  • jual_rumah

    As a marketer I find a few new term in this post. I think I need more study and real clue.