Four Techniques for Delighting Your Customers

  Agile   Communications Management   CRM   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

Agile teams pride themselves on delivering solutions that delight their customers, but in practice they can easily confuse those persons paying for the solution (customers) and those using the solution (users). The elementary agile requirement--user stories--often only further reinforces this. By failing to distinguish between these two sets of stakeholders and their respective needs, agile teams can miss value-creation opportunities.

While attending a recent Certified Product Owner course, I learned some simple techniques for better defining the customer and their desires. This article will introduce some of these techniques that help ensure teams know who their customers and users are, who they are not and how to create winning solutions for delivering value.

Customers vs. Users
While both customers and users can be considered stakeholders, they are not the same. Customers make purchasing decisions whereas users interact directly with your product or solution. Sometimes they can be the same person--for example, if you decide to purchase a new iPhone you are both the customer and the user because you’ll not only exchange money for the new phone, you’ll also use it to make calls, check your e-mails and take pictures.

On the other hand, if you develop software to handle help-desk inquiries in an organization, your customer may be the CIO--but the …

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