The Agile Manifesto was published more than a decade ago in 2001. Since then, the industry has sometimes morphed the message of what it means to be Agile. Sometimes confusing or merging it with Lean development, Scrum and Kanban manufacturing (which all add great things to the mix). Though with any real truism, the wisdom in it still rings through today.
Delighting the Customer should always be the higher goal between corporate Silos
Problems occur in the gaps between people. Often issues occur between individual people, teams and silos, companies and customers because of miss understood lines of responsibility and unmet expectations. How often have we all heard the expression that a problem arose because “things fell through the cracks” He then went on to explain that the ideal solution to these problems is not reorganization or rewriting of agreements, but in finding the higher goal that the separate sides would benefit from, and forge a joint resolve to accomplish that goal.
Build a thriving Partner Ecosystem to reach Enterprise SaaS customers
To build the Partner ecosystem you need to start somewhere. As the technology vendor, your responsibility will be to understand how you can benefit partners and attract them. Treat them as customers and gateways to your customers – and understand the mutual value proposition that is the basis of the relationship. Focus on that, and the ecosystem will grow.
Agile – Bringing down the cost of change
For this post, I’d like to step back a moment. Instead of looking at the why’s and how’s of the methodology, I would like to instead consider one of the key benefits that Agile brings to both us as product creators and to our customers. What you might think of as the “Value” with a capital “V” of Agile. This is that it brings down the cost of change.
Does your B2B Customer Persona include their job KPIs
Now let’s consider instead that your B2B customer decision maker is an area Sales Manager. This Sales Manager measured on Market Share and Revenue as well, but they may be more directly measured on the length of the sales cycle and their team’s lead to conversion rate. For this customer, your messaging could focus more on the impact of closing deals anytime anywhere; enabling their mobile sales teams to close deals faster, as well as cutting down on the number of buyers who change their mind in the previous extended time before the invoice was sent.
Isn’t “10,000 steps walked today” just a Vanity Metric?
When it comes to wearables, Is “10,000 steps walked today” actually just a vanity metric? Will it really make me change my behavior and lose weight? It is all still too bleeding-edge. Like the early days of business analytics, are we still just presenting data to people rather than giving them meaningful metrics that will change behavior.
