Development Flow For Customers

Many project managers and leads think that the customer should not participate in the development process. However, proper exposure may give more information to the customer and provide valuable feedback to the technical team.

Presentation

If you are thinking about discussing your development flow with the customer, you are on the right track. You should show the customer what flow you have right now and explain why it was done this way.

It is an excellent idea to start by presenting the technical team and explaining your current application development approach. There is a good chance that the customer may learn something new about the project and deepen one’s knowledge in that area.

Then you should present the project itself at the current stage and explain how you plan to continue development. Here it is worth highlighting areas that are either unclear or may take additional effort during the development. This way, the customer can understand potentially risky areas of the project.

Discussion

The next step is to discuss the current flow with the customer and see what you can change there to make it more efficient and satisfy the customer simultaneously.

The first topic you may want to discuss is the development of new features. For example, the customer may want to see demos not at the end of the iteration (every 2-4 weeks) but every week. This way, one may adjust expectations on the fly and know in advance what the results will look like.

The following important topic is the development process itself. Usually, the technical team builds the process in a typical way to deliver the result with reasonable quality in good time. The quality may be more critical for the customer than the time (or vice versa), so the team may adjust the process to deliver better results.

Other areas that often require discussion are communication and support. The customer may want to share expectations or provide quick feedback on the application functionality. It may also happen that the customer needs some attention from the technical team to help one to use the application.

Adaptation

Finally, it is time to figure out how to adapt or customize your development flow. It would be best if you took into account the preferences of both the customer and the technical team. However, in many cases, they may want opposite things.

The customer usually wants to implement and release features as soon as possible to save time and money. Quality and performance are necessary only if they do not slow down the development. The customer often also wants to have quick demos several times a week to oversee and correct the implementation if needed.

The technical team usually wants the opposite things. People there want to build a reliable feature with excellent architecture, which takes time. The technical team usually prefers to make one demo per iteration and not spend extra time preparing the demo every two or three days.

So, it would help if you found a balance between these two points of view and set up the process to satisfy both sides. It is also good to track performance metrics and get feedback regularly.