Are your business people involved directly in your development process? Do they give feedback directly to the development team?
One of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto is
“Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project”
In other words, developers should ideally have a direct channel of communication to their business people/customers. This has been a pain point that I have seen throughout my career. Some of the things I have done to bridge this gap is to:
- Have a sprint review as defined in the Scrum Guide, show and let business people use the software that was recently developed, and build out new backlog items to iterate on in an upcoming sprint
- Have the developers sit with business people and see/use the product so that they may build a relationship, gain insight/ideas to improve the product, and develop customer empathy
- Create team chat rooms that include business people directly with the development team (this especially helps with offsite teams/members)
- Take the developers out in the field to see the customers using the product in a true business setting
There is a big disconnect and need for business and customer engagement within the software industry. A lot of times it starts with someone bridging the gap between developers and business such as a product owner. Psychologically, these two mindsets are vastly different. From the way they work and think to the language they speak, engineers fall on one side and business people fall on the other.
What things have you tried to improve developer and business engagement?