Combining agile development with customer development
Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. Jim Murphy is a long-time agile practitioner in startups. He's often felt that there was something missing. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next. The breakthrough idea of agile is that software should be built iteratively, with the pieces that customers value most created first. This is a significant improvement on the traditional waterfall methodology.
But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully. Or, rather, they apply it successfully, but things don't turn out so well. Enter Jim's post...
I remember having this exact same "aha!" moment, auditing Steve Blank's class when we were first building IMVU. Ever since that time, I have struggled to explain how the feedback loop in customer development should interface with the feedback loop in product development.
If you look at the origins of most agile systems, including Scrum and XP, they come out of experiences in big companies. Consider the classic project that was essential to the creation of extreme programming, the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System. This was to be a new piece of software to run payroll for Chrysler. In a project like that there are lots of big questions that need to be answered in order to build a working product. But you don't generally have to ask "what problem are we trying to solve?" That's pretty clear. In the case of C3, that was to run payroll for 87,000 employees, who were presumably receiving payroll before the project began. What causes projects like this to fail in traditional software development is that the solution is unknown. Agile is one way to succeed, because pursuing unknowns iteratively is a good way to mitigate risk. What do you do if the problem itself is unknown?
In a startup, rather than think of ourselves as having a marketing department and an engineering department, I now believe it's better to think of ourselves as focusing our energies on unknown problems and unknown solutions. Approaching each of them iteratively is the right thing to do. But the biggest payoff of all can be found when we combine them into one large company-wide feedback loop.
Last year, I found myself back in Steve Blank's class at Haas, this time trying to teach the students about what it's like running engineering alongside customer development. Working with Steve, I came up with schematic diagrams that I hope illustrate this point. (You can see the full deck in my post on Customer Development Engineering or listen to audio from a more recent lecture)
I thought given Jim's prompting it might be useful to post this excerpt. Notice that the unit of progress changes as we move from waterfall to agile to the lean startup. For more on this latter point and why it's so important, consider taking a look at the posts Achieving a failure and Throwing away working code.
Anyway, thanks Jim for the great post. And credit once again goes to Nivi from Venture Hacks for sharing it with me.
But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully. Or, rather, they apply it successfully, but things don't turn out so well. Enter Jim's post...
Customer Development - The Missing Piece!
But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem - the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging - was figuring out what the product backlog should be.
The backlog is the answer to the question: “What is the most important work we should do right now?” it presumes that you could confidently make that list, and keep it up to date as things change - or at least articulate what you’re building and for whom. Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail. How do you really make the best backlog for your company?
XP and Scrum don’t have much to say - they punt. Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go. Well, that’s fine as far as it goes but when you’re a startup and you don’t have customers yet you need a way to bootstrap and that can feel awfully chaotic and wasteful. What’s worse is that as you grow you’ve probably developed some pretty bad habits as far as setting priorities and strategy: like thinking you’re a genius - just because you got funded - and that genius is what allows you to *know* what the market wants.
I remember having this exact same "aha!" moment, auditing Steve Blank's class when we were first building IMVU. Ever since that time, I have struggled to explain how the feedback loop in customer development should interface with the feedback loop in product development.
If you look at the origins of most agile systems, including Scrum and XP, they come out of experiences in big companies. Consider the classic project that was essential to the creation of extreme programming, the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System. This was to be a new piece of software to run payroll for Chrysler. In a project like that there are lots of big questions that need to be answered in order to build a working product. But you don't generally have to ask "what problem are we trying to solve?" That's pretty clear. In the case of C3, that was to run payroll for 87,000 employees, who were presumably receiving payroll before the project began. What causes projects like this to fail in traditional software development is that the solution is unknown. Agile is one way to succeed, because pursuing unknowns iteratively is a good way to mitigate risk. What do you do if the problem itself is unknown?
In a startup, rather than think of ourselves as having a marketing department and an engineering department, I now believe it's better to think of ourselves as focusing our energies on unknown problems and unknown solutions. Approaching each of them iteratively is the right thing to do. But the biggest payoff of all can be found when we combine them into one large company-wide feedback loop.
Last year, I found myself back in Steve Blank's class at Haas, this time trying to teach the students about what it's like running engineering alongside customer development. Working with Steve, I came up with schematic diagrams that I hope illustrate this point. (You can see the full deck in my post on Customer Development Engineering or listen to audio from a more recent lecture)
I thought given Jim's prompting it might be useful to post this excerpt. Notice that the unit of progress changes as we move from waterfall to agile to the lean startup. For more on this latter point and why it's so important, consider taking a look at the posts Achieving a failure and Throwing away working code.
Eric Ries Lean Startup Schematic View Of Agile Development And Customer Development
View more presentations from Eric Ries.
Anyway, thanks Jim for the great post. And credit once again goes to Nivi from Venture Hacks for sharing it with me.
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