Customer Inside - Handle With Care!
Organiser: RobMaijers
Session duration: 45 minutes
Session type: Goldfish Bowl discussion
Intended Audience: anyone interested in the role of stakeholders/customers in the development process and the communication involved.
Session language: English
Description:
We will take a case setting in which multiple stakeholders (from diverse
groups and with diverse goals) collectively make up the customer role.
A development team builds functionality for multiple external customers and
other stakeholders, some of which provide money. It is at the same time a
product development project, aimed at selling the product to future
customers. As a consequence, current external customers desires will have
to be fitted with the course the product itself will follow (the product
vision). Currently, an internal customer has been appointed to give the
product its own course (i.e. not too customer specific) and safeguard the
product vision and thus future sellability.
The customers pay for the project they want to implement using the product.
The development team has the various customers themselves haggle for
priority of their stories. They want solutions to their specific problems,
and are not too interested in the product vision or in the other customers,
especially when ideas conflict. Customers detest that common denominator
functionality is being built and keep asking for specific functionality.
Most of them don't want to be on-site, especially when nothing specifically
for them is being built a the moment.
The internal customer currently ensures the translation from specific
customer stories to more general product stories. Problems of this
situation are that the internal customer becomes a sort-of functional
designer rewriting stories. The customers don't recognise their stories
anymore.
Questions can be asked to clarify the case (important).
The goal is to identify successful (and possibly some less successfull)
ways and practices of handling the this multiple stakeholder
product-development situation.
Focal topics:
- How to handle the conflicting wishes of multiple customers?
- Customers are not interested in what other customers want
- Customers don't want to be on site
- How to shape the customer role when doing product development?
- Functionality is generalized (to ensure sellability to a range of future customers)
- Generalized functionality has no actual current demand (short term focus of current customers results in specific features)
- Can we handle current customers in a product development project?
- Product development relies (is dependent) on funding of current customers
- Customers want specific features, not generally sellable to future customers
- Generalized functionality focussed toward future customers is not appreciated by current customers
- Customers don't recognize generalized stories
- How to ensure that the result of product development is usable for end users?
- The end users are not involved in the development (they are not customers and they don't bring a bag of money)
- No one feels the pain of a not usable product until it is actually in use
Process:
- Introduction
- Participants choose discussion topics
- For each topic
- Identity causes
- Propose solutions
- Conclusions by the moderator
- Wrap up
back to Program
See the CustomerInsideTranscript for the results of the session |
