Tag Archives: lean startup

Make the Customer Try Out Your Product

Posted by on 2011/12/07 No comments

I’ve been participating in demo meetings with customers and product owners for years now, but we seldom talked about interesting things or rarely made significant decisions during these meetings. There can be several explanations to that, but I’m pretty convinced that we were doing these meetings wrong. The chart below depicts the categories help you understand why I think this way. Here are the content of the user stories brought to the meetings:

The figure represents quite a typical progress, nothing is wrong about it at first sight. Let’s add to the picture what has been discussed after each sprint during the mentioned demo meeting. For example, during the demo meeting of sprint 3, we mostly talked about user interface (UI) issues and only a little about functionality:

In most of the cases the team presents a subset of user stories during the meeting, and the customer just sits there – because it is a presentation after all – and has a couple of comments on the user interface of the product. Sometimes, they talk about real functionality, but that is not enough. Everything is just fine until the product is released or delivered for system testing:

This is the point when the customer really “enters” into the “functionality” section and even into the “non-functional requirements” section and starts using the product. What happens now is a disaster, because

  • the delivered software works differently than it is supposed to work
  • nobody really remembers how to use the product
  • it doesn’t meet the performance criteria

I think everybody has been in a similar situation who is doing Scrum. Read more »

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Customer Diversity

Posted by on 2011/08/23 No comments

Last year at xp2010 Scott E. Page talked about the benefits of diversity inside an organisation. According to Scott, diversity improves the performance and decision making process of an organisation.

Today late afternoon I attended a startup meetup event where Patrick Vlaskovits talked a bit about the diversity among customers. Based on his experience startup companies should define themselves a specific market segment – their customers – which they can serve properly and are really passionate about.

Imagine that a company works with a variety of customers. Different people want different things – sorry for the cliché – and there is no way that a startup company can deliver a feature or a set of features which satisfies all of them. This eventually will cause dissatisfaction among the customers, and they’ll leave the company. Fewer customers means less revenue or no revenue at all, and the company shuts down.

Startups aren’t necessary small companies, actually, their size does not matter that much, but their passion really does. People start companies because they have a good idea, they see something in it, and finally but not least they are passionate about it. If the “not-the-target” customer wants a feature which the company is not interested in at all, it is pretty sure that there won’t be any passion in working on that feature. Without passion the product will lose its edge, and the real (target) customers may leave.

It seems that a company can really benefit from the diversity among team members, but on the other hand, it causes trouble if we are talking about customers. Read more »

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