The agile manifesto has four points:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
While many organizations I work with struggle with aspects of each of these, the customer collaboration seems to be almost absent.
Many organizations have started hiring UX and product designers. They are supposed to act on behalf of the customer. So you have specialists in the organization that many organization still struggle to incorporate in a useful way.
Every product team with or without designers should collaborate with the customer with at least these two things:
- Have the actual customer validate the priority of the stories to be worked in the backlog
- At the end of each iteration of sprint have the user perform the story. If the users succeed then the story can be accepted
I guarantee your product will meet your customers’ needs better than ever before.