The Voice of the Customer in Agile

The ‘Voice of the Customer’ is the weakest link in Agile web development.

New advances – which make Choice Modelling cheap, fast and relevant – solve this problem.

The ‘Voice of the Customer’ is a poorly taught and poorly understood component of Agile methodologies. There is no consensus on the tools that should be used to capture it.

Of the methods that are in use, the most rigorous are complex, costly and time-consuming, and can’t be easily and quickly repeated at each iteration. The less rigorous methods are cheap and quick, but the information they produce is actually worthless (we have proven this, as I demonstrate below).

So, measuring the ‘Voice of the Customer’ in Agile web development is generally done either:

-          not at all; or

-          poorly; or

-          fairly rigorously at the outset, then poorly or not-at-all throughout.

But there are now Choice Modelling methods available that allow us to quickly, cheaply and accurately measure the Voice of the Customer, both initially and throughout development.

Let me illustrate by example.

On a recent web project we simply wanted to know which features our customers wanted most. So we conducted a basic online survey to build a choice model. In order to prove this was a superior approach, we conducted a parallel online survey using the common ‘rating’ approach (where respondents rate each feature on a scale of 1 to 5).

Both approaches involved exactly the same cost (cheap), time (2 days) and sample (40 people). The results are summarised below.

The Rating results weren’t statistically meaningful. The features all scored about the same average, and the highest scoring feature was actually the number 6 ranked feature in the Choice Model. These results were either useless, or - if you ignored statistical significance and took notice of the highest average rating – wrong.  

Because the choice survey was so quick and cheap, we’ll be able to repeat it between each sprint, in order to see if (and how) customers’ preferences change as they became exposed to more fully developed iterations of some of the features.

Having seen the benefits of this approach, I think you’d have rocks in your head to use anything else.  The adoption of these new Choice Modelling tools can only be a Good Thing for product innovation online.

I am happy to point anyone who wants to know more in the right direction.