Bringing Customers into the Sprint Review - Part 1

Throughout all my years of experience, nothing seems to strike more fear in the hearts and minds of developers, the product management team, and executive leadership as when you ask them, “Have you invited customers to your sprint review?” When you ask that question the first time, you usually get a combination of stunned silence, jaws dropping, and reflexive protestations. You know what? I totally get it - it scared the heck out of me the first time it was suggested to me.

Time for a quick riddle: what’s the only thing worse than working on a new product or feature for three weeks (or however long your sprint is) and then hearing customers tell you how it won’t meet their needs or that you did a poor job implementing it?

Answer: Working on a new product or feature for six months and then getting the feedback from your customers that it won’t meet their needs or that you did a poor job implementing it.

It turns out that knowledge, also known as feedback, is power.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to share several real world examples of when I’ve invited customers or internal customer representatives to our sprint reviews to help you understand the power of inviting customers to your sprint reviews, despite the anxiousness that doing so entails.

This week, I want to take you back to the mid-2000s, when I was working on a relatively small team, perhaps about 5-6 people, on an early SaaS product in a software product company where my product’s revenue were barely a rounding error to the company’s overall software revenue. To make matters worse, we only had three main customers, although they were each very large organizations, and I think they were only using the product because they had to. We mostly got complaints that no one in their very large organizations liked using the product. As an added challenge, given the small amount of revenue and our place at the bottom of our company’s product portfolio, we were receiving little to no support and attention from our product management team. Not a great situation to be in. The good news was that we really had very little to lose, so we decided to experiment and approached each of our three major customers to see if they would be willing to attend a monthly sprint review (our sprints were 4 weeks long at the time). In reality, having nothing to lose is probably what enabled me to overcome my fear of what our customers would tell us.

The first sprint review was definitely a bit of learning and feeling our way, both for our team and for the three customer leaders who attended (virtually). We demonstrated the features we had completed during the sprint and looked and listened for clues as to what our customers were thinking. It wasn’t long before one of the customers got up the courage to say, “You know what would make this more helpful is if it did X instead of Y".” My team then followed with, “Explain to us why that would be useful.” After a few minutes of back and forth discussion, with each of the three customer participants providing input built upon the others, I was able to ask the question, “So if we were able to solve this need through our work next sprint, do you agree that would be the most beneficial thing we could add to the service over the next four weeks?” The customers emphatically agreed, so we knew what to work on for the next sprint.

This continued for several months, and each month, every one participating in the sprint review became more comfortable, more open, and more excited for the next sprint review. Something even more remarkable happened. Prior to our first sprint review, our customers viewed us as a vendor. After the first several sprint reviews, our key customer leaders viewed us as partners.

The story gets even better. Fast forward six months or so, and our customer leaders have gone from irritated critics to full-throated supporters of our product. As they went back to their internal users in their companies, they found that they went from previously dragging people along to be the next part of the worldwide rollout in the organizations to having a line of people requesting that they be the next group to have the service rolled out to them. As icing on the cake, each of them offered to be references for our product and each spoke at our annual user conferences to pitch our service to other potential customers.

Now not every situation is like this and not every situation is going to turn out as well as this case did, but I hope it gives you some sense of the inherent power of giving your customer a seat at your sprint reviews. I also want to note that the sprint review should not be the first or the only place in your product development lifecycle where you get customer feedback. That’s a topic for another blog, but again, anything that focuses you on customer outcomes instead of product outputs is a positive thing.

Next week, we’ll explore some anti-patterns of bringing customers into the room.