Implementing Scrum2 min read
Customer Versus End User: Who is your Customer?
Fix the time and budget, focus on delivering value, and change what a Sprint Review actually means — the difference between your customer and your end user matters.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my clients around the world lately helping to define their customers versus end users. It matters — most of the time it’s actually about defining one or the other first. Let’s unpack that today.
Why Is This Important?
One of the main reasons agile and scrum projects “fail” is because Scrum Teams fail to deliver working products to their end users at the end of each Sprint.
You might think the people paying for the project are paying for you to deliver on-time, within budget, and containing every request as defined in the original requirements document. That’s fixed-time, fixed-budget, and fixed-scope. Good luck with that.
What’s the alternative when Implementing Scrum in the real world?
Fix The Time And Budget
Consider fixing the time and budget instead. This is a simple calculation. Your time can be fixed to an iteration or Sprint length — two weeks, one month, pick one, keep it short. This is your cycle time. Your budget can be fixed to the “burn rate” of the Scrum Team — if the people are dedicated to one team, take their fully-loaded cost and calculate from there.
Keep those two concepts simple. Really.
Focus. #deliver
Here’s your key to success on an agile or scrum project: focus on delivering the highest value increments by the end of your Sprint, so you can deliver working product to your end users at each Sprint Review.
Change The Conversation
A Sprint Review is not a demo, a PowerPoint presentation, or an update on completed Jira tickets, a pretty burn-down chart, your “velocity,” or a Gantt chart. I’m betting some people reading this are experiencing exactly that today (see DarkScrum.com from my colleague Ron Jeffries for a rabbit hole of great information).
The advantage of having a working product to show at the Sprint Review is that you can engage your customers (stakeholders) in a real-world conversation about what matters to your end users. Invite end users — real people — and get feedback. Have a conversation.
Yes, this can be tough to do. Be a professional and try delivering a working product to your end users at your next Sprint Review. Watch what happens. The conversation changes. Use this feedback to update your Product Backlog for Sprint Planning on your next iteration.
Rinse and repeat. Happy customers. Happy end users.
What Next?
Don’t worry about being perfect. Pick one thing as a team to work on together — maybe discuss this at your next Sprint Retrospective.
Think about this: do you know what your competitors are doing instead of “doing demos” that mask as status report updates to stakeholders?
Your successful competitors are delivering value to both their customers and end users by the end of every Sprint.
Contact me (with feedback) or connect with me on LinkedIn to discuss this more together.
Weekly, free, no fluff
Get one actionable Scrum idea a week.
Saturday morning emails on Implementing Scrum in the real world — the same cartoons and straight talk that built this site.
Subscribe — It's Free