Bringing Customers into the Sprint Review - Part 2

In part 1 of this blog series, I discussed some of the great benefits to literally inviting your customer into your sprint reviews to provide feedback on your latest product increment. Today, I am going to share some of the anti-patterns, or things that can go wrong, when bringing customers into your sprint review.

While I think that everyone should strive to have actual end customers in their sprint reviews, sometimes we have to rely on internal surrogates to represent the voice of the customer in our sprint reviews. I remember one such example at the company I was working for many years ago where the customer was represented by one or more of our executives. Let me be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with having your executives attend sprint reviews. In fact, it should be encouraged. We are building a culture of transparency and during sprint reviews the team is eager to show what they have accomplished. However, there are two dangers when having executives there to represent the customer. The first danger is that chances are good that what your executives think your customers want is quite different from what your customers actually want. The feedback you get may be very misleading and inaccurate. The second danger is that your executives give feedback in a manner that closes down further discussion and debate and silences everyone else in the room. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the feedback, you could wind up with team members dreading sprint reviews. That’s the exact opposite of what we want - team members should be excited to show off what they have learned and what they have added to the product, and to get feedback from their customers. My advice would be to encourage executives to attend and listen - listen to the team describe what they have learned and demonstrate what they have added to the product, and to also listen to the feedback and reactions of the customers and other internal stakeholders in attendance. Of course we also want their feedback, but care must be taken on how they provide it in this forum.

Another issue can arise when you invite actual customers into the sprint review, but they do not represent the needs and wants of a majority of your customers. When this happens, the team may act upon the feedback in such a manner that negatively impacts the majority of your customers. The best way to avoid this issue is to either ensure you have a good enough cross-section of your customer base in the sprint reviews to be representative of the overall wants and needs, or simply rotate in different customers at your sprint reviews so that over time, your customer feedback is not dominated by one small subsection of your customer base. If you have a robust continuous discovery program where you work with customers to get feedback on either product ideas or to identify opportunities to provide value to your customers, you can piggyback on this program to solicit feedback from these customers at your sprint reviews.

Even after you address the issue of getting a representative sample of your customer base participating in the sprint review, there is another potential drawback to be cognizant of. Having customers present may inhibit discussion amongst the whole development and product team. Internal team members, especially development team members, are naturally reticent to raise any issues in front of customers, for understandable reasons. You have to provide them with the proper training, support, and psychological safety to put them in a position to confidently have a back and forth discussion with customers, especially when it comes to learning more about the customer’s needs, wants, or desires. If that is not feasible in your particular environment, then at a minimum you will want to provide a separate portion within the sprint review for the internal team and stakeholders to be able to freely ask questions to the teams and vice versa. Remember that the sprint review is not a customer demo, but rather a mechanism for reviewing what the team accomplished over the current sprint, to receive feedback from any stakeholders, and have any needed discussions to clarify the feedback.

Next time, I will finish out this three-part series by sharing another story around successfully bringing customers into the sprint review. Stay tuned!