Customer-Centric Agility

The first principle of the Agile Manifesto says the highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable output. Yet in many organisations, agile transformation focuses more on internal processes than on the customer: meetings, roles, tools. Customer-centric agility means turning that focus back to the customer.

What does customer-centric agility mean?

In a customer-centric organisation, success is measured by the value that reaches the customer, not by the amount of work done. Three questions are asked constantly:

• Who is our customer, and which of their problems are we solving?
• How long does it take for our work to reach the customer?
• How quickly do we learn how the customer reacts?

Six ways to put the customer at the centre

1. Shorten feedback loops

Don’t wait for the product to be finished to get customer feedback. Deliver in small increments, show early prototypes and review usage data regularly. The Sprint Review should be a working session where customers or their representatives give feedback.

2. Map work through the customer’s eyes

See which units a customer request passes through inside the organisation and how long it waits at each step. What matters to the customer isn’t your internal process, but how long it takes for their request to be met.

3. Choose the right measures

Instead of utilisation and the number of completed tasks, track customer-facing measures such as delivery time, customer satisfaction, usage and recurring complaints.

4. Give teams contact with customers

If only sales or product managers know the customer, teams learn about the customer’s problem second-hand. Access to customer interviews, site visits and support tickets helps teams make better decisions.

5. Simplify processes

Approval steps, reports and hand-offs that add no value for the customer lengthen delivery time. Ask lean thinking’s core question: “Does this step create value for the customer?”

6. Leaders set the example

The more leaders use customer data and feedback in their decisions, the more customer-centric the organisation becomes. Having customer complaints on the leadership agenda regularly sends a strong message.

Common mistakes

• Adding customer requests to the list without ordering them. Customer focus doesn’t mean doing every request; it means doing the most valuable one first.
• Forgetting internal customers. The customers of support and platform teams are other teams inside the organisation.
• Treating technology as the only answer. Chatbots and digital channels are useful, but they don’t speed up a slow internal process.

Conclusion

Customer-centric agility is a return to the real purpose of agile methods. Meetings and tools are means; the goal is to deliver value to customers faster and more accurately.

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Related: Are the Agile Manifesto values still valid?, What is a Product Owner?. To see your flow towards the customer together, have a look at our lean transformation services.