Mike Lyons explains why user involvement matters in agile development. He points to Colgate frozen foods, Microsoft Clippy, and Heinz purple ketchup as products that failed without enough user feedback. The fix: ask users daily, "Is this what you want?"
This agile way of working may be slightly different than your product owner is used to. It's possible in your organization that your, your product ownership will come out of a very traditional project management type of world where the idea was, well, hey, just, you know, just build according to these requirements to build the thing of value according to this written set of requirements. As we continue to discuss, as we continue to discover together, shared understanding is almost never a shared document. So you may find that there's maybe a little reluctance, if you will, to be so engaged with the software development team. But I want to hearken us back to the Agile Manifesto principle. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. So sometimes your product owner may be reluctant to be involved daily. That may seem like a pretty big commitment. I want to point out the importance of user involvement early and often by demonstrating just a few products that failed to engage with their users early. Take for example, Colgate Foods. In 1982, Colgate came up with a very strange brand extension and decided to move into the frozen food market. Not only did that product line not take off, I think, you know, maybe people thought the food tasted like toothpaste, but actually their sales of toothpaste began to decline as well. Consider this, and some of you might chuckle, but in the 90s, Microsoft introduced us to the Office Clippy. You remember Clippy? Well, hi there, looks like you're starting to write a letter. How can I help? Remember him? Clippy would pop up with this interface that was supposed to help us. And I don't know if you remember this, but not only would it pop up at the most, you know, like inconvenient times and be fairly annoying. It was a resource hog, you know, your. The memory consumption on your machine would spike out. Microsoft soon acknowledged its unpopularity and removed it from the product. How about another example? In about the year 2000, Heinz came up with an easy squirt ketchup, but it was purple. The idea was that it would appeal to children, but when we squirted it all over our french fries, we were more disgusted than anything else. I worked with a team member once on one of the development teams and he was fond of saying, is this what you want? He would do it all the time, like almost to an annoying point, you know, but as a development team with our product owner, daily we'd say, is this what you want? And it wasn't to be annoying, obviously. It was to gain user feedback as fast as possible. Listen, feedback is our friend. Now, we may not always enjoy the sharpening that comes from from criticism, but it is so important that we have it so user feedback. Get it early, get it frequent, often, and all throughout the life cycle. Don't just wait until the end. Listen, you may be following every other agile habit that there is on your teams. You may be like really hitting on all cylinders at the team level, but if you don't engage your user, it's not going to matter how agile you are.
