Today’s business environment is characterized by rapid change driven by market trends, customer expectations and technological capabilities. Even the core nature of what you do and how you do it has changed for many. While you can’t avoid this change and likely have spent a lot of effort managing it, how can you leverage it to effectively Turn Change Into Value™?
You can deliver value by focusing on your customers and their changing needs. The first and highest of the twelve principles of the Agile manifesto states: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Satisfying customers in a rapidly changing environment requires you to keep in tune with changing customer needs through established feedback loops. Small, incremental steps in response to feedback can help you quickly identify and deliver incremental value. A Product Management approach, combined with Business Agility, provides collaborative, fast ways of working that focus on serving customers and creating lasting ROI.
Understanding Your Customers
To be fully in tune with customers, you must first have a clear understanding of their problem space. What is it that they are trying to accomplish? What are their experiences and pain points? Are there opportunities for you to improve their outcomes? How does all of this align with your organization’s business value?
Organizations can struggle to define their customers’ challenges and needs early on. Early-stage assumptions and plans are only starting points in an ongoing process that must be Agile and responsive to change. A focus on delivering strategic business value, which includes collaboration among your teams, business stakeholders and your customers through Agile processes, is necessary to be proactively aware of and responsive to your customers’ changing needs. Organizational Agility isn’t something that can be mandated or implemented overnight. It involves a continuous maturation process.
Agile Journey
Wherever you are on your Agile maturity journey, every organization operates in its own unique ecosystem that includes the customers you serve, the challenges you face and the solutions you pursue. To succeed in your environment, you need frameworks that work specifically for you, help you assess where you are and position you for success. You can use maturity models, like xScion’s Agile Adoption Maturity Model, to assess your people, processes and technology to better understand where you are in your Agile journey and how to best move forward.
Agile Product Management
A Product Management approach, coupled with an Agile culture, can help you better understand the problem space and deliver optimized products faster and cheaper with a focus on both your customers and quality. A flexible Product Management framework combined with multiple Lean and Agile practices, like xScion’s Product Genome, allows you to deliver value early while being responsive to your customer’s changing needs.
In the face of rapid change and uncertainty, your organization needs to be efficient, effective and flexible. An Agile culture paired with a Product frame of mind can Turn Change Into Value by helping you anticipate and validate internal and external changes, take appropriate and timely actions and quickly deliver value to customers.
