For companies that want to provide value to its customers early and often, the focus needs to be engrained in the teams building the products. Everyone on the team should be focused on value, which will help lead to better User Stories and more valuable product increments.
When planning to release a new feature for your software product, the tendency of the engineering team is to think of all the necessary architecture, infrastructure and step-wise tasks that needs to happen to support the feature. But what todays “Value Driven” engineers and product managers focus on his how to create Customer Value as soon as possible.
It’s a challenging shift in mindsets and a “re-programming” of teams focus. And it’s not the natural or instinctive thing to do. The reality is that engineers like to build things and they especially like to think about how they would build it. For most, thinking about the customer value and how to make that the priority over getting all their perfect building blocks in place, is not natural or even achievable in some cases.
Unfortunately, developing work items the “building block” way leads to difficulties in coordinating efforts to reach the final “Customer Value”. Essentially delaying it too long while competitors have the chance to beat you to market.
Training engineers to think about customer value first and how to achieve this with engineering is a cultural and process shift for most teams and will take time. The Agile principles and framework is ideal for setting the team up for success.
Some techniques that will help when grooming features, is to focus conversations on “Why & What” the customer wants verse “How” to build it. Save the “how” discussion for engineers only. Then craft user stories (see our post on Writing Effective User Stories) that uses the INVEST strategy to think about requirements as a vertical slice, rather than a horizontal one. Following this strategy will be difficult at first, but will lead to better user stories that provide Customer Value sooner.
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