When you skip stones in a pond, the stone crosses the surface of the water before sinking beneath the surface. Each spot that the stone spot ripples; a force moving the water with a greater intensity than before. These ripples can move the pondweed, moss, fallen leaves or lily pads. Of course, fish beneath the surface flee the ripples, in fear of predators, but, watching the water respond to the stone is subtler. And the way that the ripples jostle lily pads is customer centricity. You don’t want to overwhelm your consumer, and cause the pad to sink. Instead, you want the surface of the water to shift what is on the surface, reflect the changes in the world, in society, through the release of your product or service. This is because, when a customer-centric organisation makes a decision, it has to consider the impact upon end users.
You may not feel this way when you see system updates at inconvenient times, or how there always seems to be road works on the motorway when you’re driving through it. But, these choices are often made through data and consideration of external factors. Making changes is essential to retaining an efficient network or product, but in order to make these changes effectively there are several avenues that must be considered, as proposed in SAFe Distilled 5.0: Achieving Business Agility With Scaled Agile Framework by Richard Knaster and Dean Leffingwell:
• Focus on the customer. Apply market and user segmentation to align and focus on specific, targeted groups based on common characteristics.
• Understand the customer’s needs. Invest the time to identify and truly understand customer needs and build solutions that address those needs.
• Think and feel like the customer. Be empathetic and see the world from the customer’s viewpoint.
• Build whole-product solutions. Design a complete solution for the user’s needs, ensuring that the initial and long-term experiences of the customer are optimal and evolve as needed.
• Create customer lifetime value. Move beyond a transactional mindset, where customers do a one-time exchange of money for a product. Instead, focus on the lifetime value of a customer. The resulting long term engagement from this approach enables businesses to create added customer value, often in ways that were not anticipated when the solution was first released.
By doing the above, an organisation can ensure that they create, and release effective products and the best times for the consumer, not just the market, by creating ripples instead of a tsunami you are able to shift the way the water flows toward the shores.
Based in London, U.K., and founded in 2016 by Arvind Mishra The Agile Works (www.TheAgileWorks.com), is an up-and-coming recruitment and Agile consulting company. Arvind is a Certified SAFe SPC and regularly delivers both private and public SAFe certification workshops.
He is a design thinking expert, Sr. enterprise, portfolio Agile Coach with over a decade of experience working as an Agile coach in diverse industries such as banking, pharma, retail, auto, oil, gas, consulting and government.
The Agile Works; a small team of three strive to help shape the leadership's mind-set and values in readiness for their business transformation journey challenges. With Arvind at the helm, we strive to provide you with the agility tools to make your company that can thrive, and not just survive.
To book a consultation, or for any enquiries, you can contact Arvind via the following email address: arvind@theagileworks.com
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