My thoughts on creating value based software product

I was recently at a scrum session where we had a conversation about Agile as a methodology Vs Agile as a mindset, and I thought to share two of my biggest takeaway from that session. A reminder for Software Business Analyst or Product owners to focus on activities that create value for users:

1. We need to do better at engaging the users NOT stakeholders:

The less time we spend with users, the more difficult it is to create value for them. I have often wondered why many find it hard to stay consistent at writing stories with the scrum format of <user>, <action>, and <benefit>. In many cases, we will know who the user is, what the action should be, but we struggle to understand how it’s going to benefit the user.

The lesson here is that we are not spending time at all with the users. There’s a lot of reliance on the stakeholders to describe what the system should do based on requirements, but that does not necessarily translate to benefits for the users. The Product owner and the team should spend some time with the users, get to understand the benefit of each feature we intend to ship. Once the benefit is clearly articulated, we will write better stories and create value-based products for users.

There are also lessons from a process perspective. Benefits, value and priority are all closely related. If we understand the benefits, we can assign appropriate value and that helps us prioritize better.

2. Our users are comparing us against some of the best software experiences today:

For the financial asset class I’m focused on, I often hear that majority of our users are either retired or older folks who want to invest in low risk financial products, for other industries, the argument might be that the application is not targeted at end users or retail users. The fragmentization of users based on what we believe they want has largely informed the way we strategize around user experience. The mistake in the case of my industry is that we have termed ‘older’ as not sophisticated enough. The truth however, is that our users are on Facebook, they are on Instagram, they are on Snapchat, they tweet. They are partakers of these experiences that many believe are sophisticated and they are constantly rating us against them.

For example, if it takes less than 4 seconds to open a page on Facebook or upload an image, our users expect the same level of performance when they visit our sites. The competitive landscape is flat, the expectations are high and as product owners we need to do a better job at working with developers and UI/UX experts at delivering great experiences to our users.