Four Techniques for Delighting Your Customers

Four Techniques for Delighting Your Customers Ryan Shriver July 6, 2010

Extreme Project Management

Agile teams pride themselves on delivering solutions that delight their customers, but in practice they can easily confuse those persons paying for the solution (customers) and those using the solution (users). The elementary agile requirement--user stories--often only further reinforces this. By failing to distinguish between these two sets of stakeholders and their respective needs, agile teams can miss value-creation opportunities.

While attending a recent Certified Product Owner course, I learned some simple techniques for better defining the customer and their desires. This article will introduce some of these techniques that help ensure teams know who their customers and users are, who they are not and how to create winning solutions for delivering value.

Customers vs. Users
While both customers and users can be considered stakeholders, they are not the same. Customers make purchasing decisions whereas users interact directly with your product or solution.