Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people practicing Agile development. I’ve been particularly interested in how requirements are gathered and presented by the product owner or product manager, trying to answer this question:
Does the Agile development process, and all the ways it forces direct customer interaction, result in better product-market fit?
The answer has been surprising, because even though the developers I’ve talked to sing the praises of active customer involvement during product implementation, at the same time they recognize that that doesn’t necessarily translate to a product with a more compelling value proposition for customers.
Why? It’s because even though you can craft a great user story and test it in the lab with real users, if no one is willing to pay for that feature, and if it doesn’t solve an important problem for the user, the result can be a failed project, despite even the best execution from the development team.
In a nutshell: there is a difference between software that is usable and software that is valuable.
So how can you avoid this situation? In our recent Market Sprint projects, we’ve been answering this question by combining requirements gathering with actual prototypical marketing and sales activities. We do this to prove demand for features. We use techniques like Google AdWords, email marketing, and channel engagement to craft a little experience and try to actually “sell” the feature.
I put the word sell in quotes, because usually we aren’t actually going to sell it – in fact we often execute the test before the feature exists. But we lead the user through an experience where they think they are pursuing a real product for the first few clicks. Then at some point we put up a page that says, “Thanks for your interest! We are still in the process of building this feature but have time to incorporate your input.” We take the opportunity to get a little user feedback at that point, which is always amazingly insightful.
The trick to executing this type of activity is getting access to people who are at the right point of the buying or decision-making process for the results to be meaningful. But if you can solve this (and we have a few techniques for doing this inexpensively) then the results are fantastic. You can actually get people to put their money where their mouths are.
And as a bonus, you also know how to market and sell the product as soon as it’s ready.
Have you ever tried something like this? What were your results?