Empathy and the Sponsored User

Empathy is an important attribute in Design Thinking. In order to solve our customer's problems, we really need to understand them. We need to walk in their shoes. But there's a limit to how far we can take this. We can spend hours talking to an astronaut, but we will never truly understand what it's like to walk in space.

Agile has this idea of the Product Owner, but you don't see much written in agile about empathy. One approach that can help you get past the empathy hurdle mentioned above is to find a key user (or users) to be part of your team. Some organizations call this a Sponsored User, the organization leading the project sponsors this person't participation in order to get their direct input into the product.

The sponsor user becomes one part of the multi-disciplinary team. Their input is important, but it isn't the only input. While they may understand the customer perspective, you need to balance all the project constraints, especially the time and cost it may take to implement some of the sponsored user's ideas. Don't lose sight of your minimal viable product (MVP) in trying to make the sponsored user happy.

You may also have more than one sponsored user, depending on the breadth of the solution you are trying to provide. If your current release has two or three major themes or epics, you could have a different sponsored user for each epic. Contrast this to the idea of having a single product owner responsible for the overall solution.

So when empathy isn't enough, make the user part of the team in order to keep the direction of your product moving the right way.

Design, Agile, and Gall's Law

The topic of design has been crossing my path lately. I see a lot of overlap with Agile principles. One of the principles I came across is called Gall’s law. It states that "all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.” It was introduced by John Gall in his book Systematics in 1975.

This is very similar to the Agile principle of simplicity. It can be seen in the practice of Test Driven Development. You write your test case and only code until it passes the test and then you stop. No gold-plating here. 

This is also similar to the principle of MVP (minimal viable product)  that originated in the Lean Startup. The idea is to make a product as simple as possible, get it into your users hands, and see how it works. You make your improvements to the product based on the feedback from your users. 

Seems pretty logical, but my experience is that it isn’t followed as often as it should be. I see plenty of examples where scope creep takes over, and rather than getting the MVP out, features keep getting added - needed or not - while the users are left waiting. So next time there's a request for just one more feature, remind people of Gall's Law.

Minimal Viable Product

I have a customer with a challenge. We've been working on an application and finished our first release. The business folks looked at it and came up with a list of "must-have's" they want before going live. The IT folks are pushing back, trying to keep additional work to a minimum before going to production. They even threw out the phrase "minimal viable product" or MVP as a way say what's the least that can be done.

However, MVP isn't about doing the least amount of work and calling it done. When taken in context of Lean Startup, it's part of a process. First you build the MVP and hypothesize what you think will happen when you go live, you measure against your hypothesis, and ideally learn something that takes you to the next step.

When I work with customers used to a more traditional approach to projects, I often see resistance to the MVP approach. They think they have one chance to get what they want, so they ask for everything. If they truly thought in terms of MVP, they would be able to think about it as what do they want first, knowing they get a chance to ask for more.

In some cases, the next step may not be in the same direction. In Lean Startup, there's the idea of the pivot, making a more fundamental change in direction. Groupon started as an online activism platform and PayPal started out building security software for handheld devices (think Palm Pilots, not smart phones). There are plenty of other examples out there of companies that didn't get the results they expected and made a pivot. Lean Startup is about getting to that point as fast as you can.

For my customer, we're going to time box another round of development, make them prioritize the must-haves, and then hopefully go to production, so they can see it they are moving in the right direction. Are you ready for your next step?