Benefits of Agile

Picture this all-too-common scenario: Your teams have been working diligently across multiple departments. They've successfully developed an MVP following perfect agile practices. The burndown charts are beautiful. The collaboration was seamless. The code is clean, tested, and ready to ship.

There's just one small problem – when you release it to your users... crickets. No one uses it. No one cares.

Sound familiar? You're not alone.

The Build Trap: A Silent Killer of Agile Success

Many agile teams find themselves trapped in a cycle of building features that don't deliver real value to their customers. They've fallen into what product strategy expert Melissa Perri calls "the build trap" – focusing on outputs (like features shipped) rather than outcomes (like solving real customer problems).

As Charlie Hill, VP of Strategic Design at IBM, explains:

"The most important question for you to ask is, can you accomplish an outcome that a user would recognize as better than the other options available? And can you get it to that user before your competition does? Because if you can't, it's going to be a struggle. If you spend too much time measuring internal velocity, you risk falling in love with a very efficient process but losing sight of the market."

Understanding the Value Exchange System

At the heart of successful agile development lies a fundamental concept: the Value Exchange System.

It works like this:

1. On one side, customers have specific problems, wants, and needs
2. On the other side, businesses create products or services to resolve these problems
3. Customers realize value only when their problems are genuinely solved
4. Only then do they provide value back to the business through loyalty, revenue, and advocacy

This reciprocal relationship forms the foundation of customer-centric agile. When teams focus on solving real customer problems rather than just shipping features, they create a virtuous cycle benefiting both the customer and the business.

Why Traditional Agile Often Misses the Mark

Agile methodologies were born from a desire to be more responsive to change and deliver value faster. But somewhere along the way, many teams lost sight of the ultimate goal – delighting customers. They became more focused on:

• Sprint velocity over customer impact
• Story points over solved problems
• Feature completion over user satisfaction
• Process efficiency over market success

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, puts it perfectly:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused... But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality."

The Six Pillars of Customer-Centric Agile

To embrace truly customer-centric agile development, teams need to adopt these fundamental principles:

1. Empathy First

• Get out from behind your desk and observe customers in their natural environment
• Listen to their frustrations and celebrate their wins
• See the world through their eyes before attempting solutions

2. Outcomes Over Outputs

• Focus on the impact your features create, not just their completion
• Measure success by customer problems solved
• Ask "How does this improve our users' lives?" before "How fast can we ship it?"

3. Continuous Discovery

• Make learning about customers an ongoing process, not a one-time event
• Regularly conduct user interviews and analyze usage data
• Keep testing assumptions and validating decisions

4. Experimentation Mindset

• Embrace uncertainty and be willing to test assumptions
• Use prototypes and MVPs to validate ideas before full commitment
• Learn from failures as much as successes

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Ensure everyone on the team has access to customer insights
• Break down silos between product, development, and user research
• Make customer understanding everyone's responsibility

6. Rapid Iteration

• Be prepared to pivot quickly based on customer feedback
• Maintain technical practices that enable fast response to learning
• Value adaptation over following a plan

Getting Started with Customer-Centric Agile

While the principles are straightforward, implementing them requires careful thought and systematic approach.

Begin by assessing your current state. Take time to understand how your team currently gathers customer insights. Look at your feature adoption rates and usage patterns. Most importantly, examine how you measure success - are you tracking outputs like velocity, or outcomes like customer impact?

Next, focus on building customer empathy across your entire team. Schedule regular customer conversations - aim for at least one per sprint. Create opportunities for team members from all functions to observe customers using your product in their natural environment. Make sharing customer insights a regular part of your agile ceremonies, not just something that happens in product meetings.

Finally, start adjusting your metrics to reflect your customer-centric focus. While velocity and story points have their place, they shouldn't be your primary measures of success. Begin tracking customer outcomes and impact. Monitor feature adoption and engagement. Pay attention to how your work affects customer satisfaction and retention.

Want to dive deeper into implementing these principles?

We've written a comprehensive guide that does just that and provides detailed frameworks for implementation.

In "Understanding Customer Value in Agile," you'll find practical techniques, real-world case studies, and step-by-step guides for transforming your agile practice. Each chapter builds on these foundational principles to help you create truly customer-centric development processes.

Get your free copy today.

‍

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.

‍

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

The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.

That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.

What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.

So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.

1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional

Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.

The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.

2. Take an Iterative Approach

Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.

3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication

Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.

Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.

4. Conduct Team Retrospectives

Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.

Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.

5. Use Collaboration Tools

The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.

Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.

No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.

6. Build a Positive Team Culture

It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.

High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.

Successful Team Collaboration

Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.

Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.

Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.

Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm

‍

Agile is about being flexible and always getting better—essential for delivering great software. But when scaling agile across teams in a program, being adaptable and flexible is easier said than done. In this post, we'll dig into the ins and outs of agile program management to help you:

• Tackle common challenges
• Use metrics and feedback loops to keep improving
• Leverage leadership for the best chance of success

By identifying some clear and actionable steps that you can start implementing now, you’ll improve your approach to program management and make your software delivery smoother and more efficient.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Agile Program Management

From dealing with dependencies to managing stakeholder expectations and balancing speed with quality, here are some challenges you might face now.

Dealing with Dependencies

Dependencies are a necessary part of working on complex software, and they need to be managed carefully to avoid disrupting delivery schedules.

Identifying dependencies early is key to keeping things running smoothly. By spotting potential bottlenecks early, like during PI Planning, we can nip them in the bud before they turn into major headaches, and:

• allocate resources more effectively
• streamline communication across teams
• keep everyone on the same page with a shared timeline.

Maintain clear communication channels and regular alignment meetings to address dependencies swiftly and efficiently. This helps everything stay in sync, and hopefully avoids last-minute 'surprises', for a more reliable delivery.

Managing Stakeholder Expectations

We can't deliver complex software on our own, so ensuring that our colleagues are informed and onboard is critical. Managing expectations across a large program is a complex challenge, but you'll be off to a great start if you are able to keep communication consistent:

• Regular Updates: Keep the lines of communication open and honest, and provide frequent updates to keep everyone in the loop.
• Be Transparent: Maintain a central source of truth for project information that everyone has access to, ensuring that objectives, milestones and priorities are clear.
• Set Realistic Expectations: Avoid over-promising and stay realistic about what can be achieved.
• Prioritize and Manage Feedback: Inevitably, there will be changes in priorities or feedback from stakeholders. It's important to have a process for managing these requests and ensuring they align with the program goals.

Agile tools that offer clear visibility into objectives, dependencies, and progress, can be the bridge between your development teams and stakeholders in leadership and other parts of the business.

By focusing on these areas, you’re not just managing expectations—you’re making sure everyone is part of the process.

The bridge between development teams and leadership, with objectives, milestones and dependencies all in one. Watch a demo or try for yourself.

Easy Agile Programs

FEATURES & PRICING

Balancing Speed with Quality

In a perfect world, we would all deliver amazing software that our customers love, at lightning speed. But the reality is that balancing time-to-market with quality is an ongoing challenge.

Agile practices like organizing work to deliver incrementally are part of the solution; they help identify problems early and deliver in a way that makes more sense than following a Gantt chart until the timelines blow out and it all falls over.

So while agile won’t make your development teams type faster, it can help them, as well as your colleagues in Product, and QA, learn what works faster, and how they can collaborate better to deliver work with quality.

Metrics and Feedback Loops

Metrics can be a powerful tool in agile program management. Velocity, burn-down charts, cycle time, lead time, and dependency reports can give valuable insights into how our teams are performing and how our projects are progressing.

• Velocity: Long-term trends help us understand team commitment over time, and estimate what can be achieved going into a sprint.
• Burn-down charts: Valuable for gauging progress throughout execution and spotting barriers to delivery.
• Cycle time: Uncover inefficiencies or bottlenecks where tasks are likely to get delayed or stuck.
• Lead time: Use the difference between an expected lead time and the actual lead time, as a starting point for understanding where delivery is being held up.
• Dependency reports: Use a snapshot of dependencies in your program to understand how teams are dependent on each other and where the biggest risks are.

Monitoring these metrics will give you a clearer picture of where work is progressing well and where you might need to make adjustments. Think of them as your project’s health check-up; a temperature check that can improve the predictability of your release.

With powerful dependency reports, you can identify bottlenecks, streamline communication, and keep your projects on track.

Easy Agile Programs

FEATURES & PRICING

Establishing Effective Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are integral to delivering software with market fit. Sprint reviews and retrospectives offer teams the opportunity to reflect on their performance, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments. DevOps practices like continuous integration further ensure that the code is consistently tested and integrated, reducing the risk of significant issues going unnoticed.

Using metrics and feedback loops allows teams to deliver software with greater predictability and transparency. Applying these practices consistently across a program means that you're better able to manage the planning and execution of work to deliver complex software to your customers in a predictable way.

The Role of Leadership in Agile Program Management

Great leadership is key to building an agile culture. It's not just about making decisions from the top; it's understanding team needs and clearing the way for them to be effective. But old 'command and control' habits are difficult to break.

As a program manager, you're the glue that connects the strategic vision of leadership with the hands-on work of development teams. Keep those communication lines open and reciprocal, so everyone understands the business goals and the strategic importance of their tasks, as well as progress and barriers to execution.

• Use agile tools to maintain a central source of truth, to give everyone a clear view of project progress and potential roadblocks.
• Foster a culture of regular feedback and continuous improvement. This proactive approach helps tackle challenges head-on and keeps everyone aligned with business objectives.
• Promote transparency and adaptability to help teams quickly adjust to changing priorities.

Keep these things in mind to help you plan and deliver with confidence. You may be the glue that holds it all together, but you can't be everything for everyone. Enlist help where you need it, and encourage an open and transparent culture where strategic priorities are understood, and everyone can see how the focus of their work contributes to the bigger picture.

An Agile Approach to Change

Taking a new approach to program management doesn’t need to be daunting. Once you’ve identified the changes that make sense for you, take an agile approach and implement incrementally. Every small change you make adds up over time and can lead to measurable improvement.

How Easy Agile Programs Can Help

Easy Agile Programs is a Jira integration that supports agile program management. It is a central source of truth for the issues, milestones, team objectives, and dependencies that make up a program of work.

Dependency maps and reports help you see the nature of cross-team dependencies clearly, so you and your teams can reorganize to avoid roadblocks that would otherwise blow out timelines with unexpected delays.

Easy to set up and tightly integrated with Jira, Easy Agile Programs supports scaled team planning and execution so you have greater confidence in delivering great software as each program increment begins.