Jira apps for agile teams

Weaving alignment and empathy into team dynamics can revolutionize software delivery. So why aren't we all doing that?

It's a real challenge for organizations with numerous teams contributing to complex software, to achieve real alignment and consensus on user needs. But it's one well worth pursuing. Striking a balance between alignment on business goals and customer empathy ensures that the software your teams are developing truly resonates with users and fulfills those business goals.

Why Alignment Matters in Agile Programs

Alignment is more than just goal setting across teams. It's about connecting workflows, acknowledging challenges, and crafting solutions that encompass everyone’s perspectives, including the needs of your users. As Tony Camacho shared on the Easy Agile Podcast:

"Alignment isn’t just about goals—it’s about understanding each other’s workflows, needs, and challenges to create solutions that work for everyone."

This comprehensive strategic alignment is crucial for steering teams in the same direction. In large enterprises, team alignment means that agile release trains can function cohesively, and strategic business goals are successfully translated across diverse teams and departments. Strong alignment empowers cross-functional teams to sustain momentum and unity at scale, even as the product roadmap evolves. For agile release trains, effective alignment means that everyone is doing their part, pulling in the same direction, and delivering successful software.  

Customer Empathy and User-Centric Development

Customer empathy is the cornerstone of aligning business goals with user needs and developing software that delivers a seamless user experience. It's about getting to know your users, their needs, and their experience with your product so that you can create better solutions for them.

"The key to meeting user needs is empathy. When teams deeply understand their users, every product decision naturally aligns with providing value."

Tony Comacho

This ethos fuels decision-making and design that prioritizes user needs and values over functional deliverables. It's great to build and release something, but not-so-great if nobody uses it.  Agile leaders who embed empathy within their teams cultivate a customer-driven culture, resulting in software solutions that address genuine challenges and delight their audience.

Empathy enhances the process of gathering requirements, conducting user testing, and embracing iterative design. Combined with effective agile program management, empathy aligns business goals with user expectations, and is a great way to improve engagement with your software and reduce churn, paving the way for successful software delivery and user retention.

Building Clarity for Effective Collaboration

Building impactful software at scale demands effective collaboration and clarity.

"Effective collaboration is rooted in clarity. Teams need to feel supported by having a shared vision and understanding of the product journey."

Tony Comacho

Cross-team alignment revolves around establishing a unified vision and setting clear goals and expectations across the agile release train. For enterprise agile solutions that support PI Planning and Product Roadmapping, upholding this clarity allows large teams to work independently yet cohesively, ensuring a targeted approach to addressing both business and user needs.

How to Achieve Agile Alignment at Scale

To encourage team alignment around user needs in your organization:

• Invest in User Research & Design: Start talking to your users; and keep talking to them. Implement user-focused design practices, gathering insights from users throughout the development stages to effectively align user needs and business goals.
• Share Vision and Goals: Regularly communicate with your teams about business objectives and user needs, ensuring they are central to your agile program.
• Use Alignment Tools and Frameworks: Leverage agile tools that help you track objectives and development milestones to ensure team alignment and cross-team collaboration. Make goals and priorities easily accessible for all your teams.
• Encourage Transparent Communication: Cultivate an environment where feedback crosses team boundaries, maintaining cross-team alignment and empathy.‍

The Benefits of Alignment and Empathy in Software Delivery

Better outcomes for your software start when business goals are aligned with user needs. Programs that place strategic agile alignment and customer empathy at the forefront, not only meet user expectations but improve the value they offer to their customers. With good agile program management, the outcome is a streamlined, effective agile release train that consistently delivers exceptional software solutions. Which is what we all want, right?

As you work towards better alignment in your agile program, nurturing empathy and clarity can unlock significant gains in satisfaction for your users and for your teams, which is great news for the overall success of your program.

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🎧 Want to hear more from Tony? Listen to The power of team alignment on the Easy Agile Podcast.

How well do you know your customers?

🧐 Well, you know they use your product…

🧑‍💻 You sometimes write user stories for them, but not based an any particular persona…

🕵️ You did talk to a customer once; it was interesting, but now you aren’t sure where those notes went…

So that you can provide value to your customers, you really do need to get to know them well. What are the goals, motivations, and pain points that bring them to your product?

This is pretty important stuff, so let’s take a look at 7 reasons why it’s good to have a healthy level of customer obsession in your agile teams...

1. Agile and customer value go hand-in-hand

Agile is all about the customer. At least, it should be.

It’s right there in the first two agile principles:

(1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

(2) Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Manifesto For Agile Software Development

If you want to take an agile approach, you’ll definitely be putting your users at the heart of your development.

2. Each sprint should deliver a better product, and more value, for your customers

One reason why agile should (in theory - we’ll expand on this shortly) benefit your customers is that every two to four weeks, you’ll ship something new. It may not be a whole new feature each time, but every update, UI improvement, and even every bug fix is delivery of incremental improvement.

This is kind of a big deal when you compare it to traditional project management approaches.

With a waterfall approach, customers could be waiting months or even years before seeing any changes. In many cases, by the time updates were released, customers, technologies, and requirements had moved on.

But by taking an agile approach, you:

• Consider and incorporate user requested updates, features, and changes at any time
• Regularly add new features to a roadmap and incrementally roll them out in weeks or months, rather than years
• Can see early on if something’s not working, because you invite your users to report issues and provide feedback right away
• Show your users how the product is developing and growing
• Keep your product moving forward, and the customer is moving forward with it
• Grow the value your product provides to your customers over time.

However, it’s important to note that all of these really awesome benefits only apply if you’re prioritising your backlog and choosing features with your customers’ best interests at heart.

3. Agile teams need to know what’s valuable to their customers

“There is a chasm between the output of a team and successful outcomes for their customers. And the success of a team is measured by outcomes, not code.”

Nick Muldoon, CEO and Co-Founder, Easy Agile

Your customers have their own priorities, and they won’t align with the priorities of your business unless you make your customers the primary concern of your business.

Your developers likely want to work on projects that they find exciting or fulfilling, so the best way to motivate your agile teams is by building empathy with the people they’re building for. The most successful teams get a kick out of delivering the features that matter most to their customers. Because if you’re not solving their most important problems, your customers will find someone else who will solve them.

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4. Customer focus leads to better quality products

When you’re obsessed with your customers, you deliver products that actually matter.

Your whole business, from leadership, to engineering, to HR and Marketing; all need to stay focussed on the people that your business is aiming to attract. When your development teams understand your customers and develop with them in mind, there’s a much better chance that they’ll build the right things at the right time for the right people. And this is critical to the success of your product and organisation.

It’s also a great way to avoid building bloated products with unnecessary features.

5. An agile customer focus is better for planning and prioritising

The worst backlogs are huge ‘to-do’ lists; task focussed and likely to be out of date. The best backlogs however, align with the customer journey, are informed by feedback from your customers, and attempt to tackle their greatest pain points.

Without a solid understanding of your customers to inform your backlog, you could end up planning sprints, versions or even entire increments that don’t deliver anything useful or move the product forward for users. And that’s a pretty costly risk.

6. Customer feedback makes agile teams better

Teams who are obsessed with customers love getting customer feedback, whether it’s via customer interviews, surveys or just having a chat about their experience.

Customer feedback is incredibly powerful because it can help you:

• Understand your customers - Know what their biggest problems are and what they care about most
• Motivate your agile team - Help your team understand the problems they’re solving, the difference they’re making, and that their work is meaningful
• Spot trends and patterns - Ensure your product adapts to what’s in demand right now and what your customers will need in the future
• Make better products - Find out what’s not working so you can fix it
• Track your progress - See whether customers are happier with your product over time
• Stay relevant - Because products and companies that solve problems stick around long-term
• Get buy in - When your customers are involved in the process, they’ll feel more committed to the product, which can reduce churn
• Improve retention - Reduce churn and keep your customers for longer when you incorporate their feedback and ideas into your product
• Make data-informed decisions - Stop relying on your assumptions and let the data drive your strategy

So customer feedback is obviously awesome, but what do you actually DO with it? How do you share it with the team and turn it into actions? Well, that’s where user story mapping comes in.

7. Agile user story mapping is all about the customer

Most agile teams run user story mapping sessions to discuss what functions and features are needed in the product. User stories maps are a visual tool for customer focused development, ensuring your customer journey stays front and center throughout development.

This is where customer feedback comes into play. When your team can access a wealth of feedback from users, they can write user stories informed by real data. This gives them a much better chance of prioritizing features that will add value to users right away. Faster time-to-value. Sounds great right?

This makes backlog prioritization and sprint or version planning so much simpler, because the whole team shares a picture of what is important to the people who use what they are building. The team knows what they should prioritise next.

Improving your customer-focus is a solid strategy.

If your team isn’t exactly obsessed with your customers, maybe it’s time to change that?

Because if you’re focusing on your customers, you’ll make more of the right decisions about what products, features, and requirements you need to work on. You may not get it right every time, but if you’re involving your customers, you’ll soon learn what doesn’t work. Your team will find it easier to make decisions, you’ll waste less time, and you’ll build a better product, that keeps getting better.

Win win.

At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.

During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.

The challenge

As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.

To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:

• Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
• Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them? 
• Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?

Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges. 

A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs

For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities: 

1. How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
2. How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
3. How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen? 

Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle. 

This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.

• For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
• For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.

Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?". 

A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm

For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:

• How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
• How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
• How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability? 

With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.

Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning. 

• This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others. 
• Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
• The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.

We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.

This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.

Your turn. What do you think?

At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next. 

These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.

If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.

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