Customer involvement in agile development

Key Takeaways

• Agile customer experience relies on gathering the right insights through diverse research methods and frequent feedback.

• Best practices include recruiting varied participants, asking "why," integrating insights into workflows, and avoiding bias.

• Leverage tools that support knowledge sharing and research transparency.

• Regularly incorporate customer insights into Agile cycles to improve products and user satisfaction.

It’s no secret that having the right customer insights is essential to a product’s success. The challenge for product teams lies in gathering the right insights to help create and improve a product that users love.

It’s a primary reason that agile methodologies have become so popular. By incorporating customer research and feedback early and often throughout the development lifecycle, agile teams embrace a human-centered approach to product development that allows them to improve the customer experience and deliver incremental value.

The following are some best practices for how to approach customer experience work.

1: Recruit the right research participants

It’s important to ensure teams recruit the right people to participate in research, including people who aren’t necessarily advocates of your company or products. This helps to invite multiple viewpoints and perspectives.

2: Constantly ask why

If you're confused or frustrated with the results of your research, there's a chance that you're not approaching it correctly. For example, researchers often lead with a preferred method, like surveys, and use them to try to understand why people prefer one thing to another.

Surveys are better suited to give you the "what" data, answering questions like "how many" or "how much." Since surveys rarely reveal why something is happening and how you can fix it, it's essential to take time to ask if your research design includes methods that will help get you to "why".

3: Incorporate customer insights into agile workflows

Agile practices include using iterative cycles that put work in front of customers frequently and incorporate feedback to improve a product. Breaking down the research journey represents an opportunity to bring human-centered, iterative practices to product development.

Product teams can create a plan with smaller milestones at each development step, enabling them to respond to changes and issues. This also allows stakeholders from outside of the research team to gain key insights into the research process in order to answer key questions, such as:

• Why did the results turn out like this?

• How can we improve our results?

• Were there any problems throughout the process that we can solve in the future?

4: Avoid biases

Some pitfalls to customer research include distorting research through bias, including:

• Cognitive bias. It’s human nature to look for evidence that confirms a hypothesis or desired conclusion. Seek to verify results through multiple sources of information in order to properly validate insights.

• Social desirability. People tend to speak in ways that make them look good to others and avoid speaking in ways that make them look bad. This bias can obscure clues about the issues users or customers are having but may be reluctant to bring up. In these situations, Stovall suggests reframing your questions with users as a way to boost their social desirability.

5: Use the right tools

As you evaluate work processes, it’s common to find email-based workflows that are inefficient and lack visibility. Information may be siloed, fragmented, and shared through scattered documents, while meetings often lack strategic focus.

Implementing collaborative work management software such as Jira and knowledge-sharing tools like Confluence can help address these challenges. These solutions help democratize insights, centralize best practices, and enable real-time progress tracking and communication with stakeholders.

In conclusion

Turning research into actionable customer insights that help deliver value is a competitive advantage for every company. The staffing, processes, and tools for research need to be in alignment to produce accurate insights.

When done right, user research will help you understand what your users need, whether you're on the right track, whether they can use what you've built, and how to optimize to continue meeting customer needs.