Are you building for users or your backlog?
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Agile development promises faster delivery, flexibility, and adaptability. But that speed comes with a hidden cost.
Traditional development anchors to deep customer research that guides the entire project. In agile environments, this foundation often gets eroded.
Daily trade-offs, scope adjustments, and feature additions gradually replace customer needs with the team's assumptions about what would be "cool" or "useful." And before long, you're building what the team wants rather than what users need.
The blind spot is invisible in your metrics: velocity stays high, stories get completed, sprints close successfully. Yet the actual value delivered diminishes as you build features users never asked for. And that's how you end up with bloated products, feature factories, and solutions hunting for problems.
To refocus your agile process on customer value,
- Recenter on the problem, not the backlog. If your team can’t clearly articulate the customer’s goal, friction, and context in their own words, they’re guessing. Stop shipping and go learn.
- Define success before you build. Not “we shipped it,” but “this changed how people behave.” Success = adoption, retention, frequency - not completed tickets.
- Validate often, and not just through surveys. Sit in on sales calls. Watch users struggle in real time. Get the engineering team to hear feedback firsthand. The loop can’t just exist, it has to be tight.
- Build less. Measure more. You don’t need 10 features. You need one that actually solves something. Most backlogs are 90% noise because no one ever prunes.
Agile, at its best, is not about velocity. It’s about learning fast. And learning only happens if you’re close to the customer.
If your roadmap isn’t shaped by real usage patterns and direct feedback, it’s just educated guessing, and you’re paying full dev-team salaries to test your assumptions in production.
These reads/watches below go deeper into what it actually looks like to run agile with a customer at the center - not as a talking point, but as an operating principle.
Dive in.
Essential Reads on Customer-Centric Agile
Customer-Centric Product Development with Jira: A Practical Webinar
~53 min webinar
Transform your Jira workflow to keep customer value at the center of your agile process.
Why Leading Agile Teams Focus on Customer Value
~6 min read
7 reasons why it’s good to have a healthy level of customer obsession in your agile teams.
Customer-Centric Agile Development - The Foundations
~4 min read
A breakdown of core practices and mindset shifts required to avoid becoming a Feature Factory.
The Agile Grapevine
Industry Pulse & Community Buzz
📝 Building a Customer-Centric Agile Team: A Journey Lined With Exceptional Experiences
A detailed experience report showing how one organization transformed its teams around customer value.
💬 "Are we doing Agile… just because?"
Reddit thread on agile rituals losing sight of real user value. When process overtakes purpose.
Your turn.
Grab your current backlog. Can your team explain how each item connects to a customer problem or goal in one sentence? If not, start pruning. Start asking why. Start building value.
Catch you next time.
Related Articles
Are you building for users or your backlog?
How to run agile with a customer at the center - not as a talking point, but as an operating principle.
Is your backlog helping or holding you back?
Resources to help you rethink how you manage and prioritize your product backlog.
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