Providing feedback and getting feedback is SOOO important.

My customers give me an idea of what they want. It’s often in the form of some behavior they want from a form or data modeling on a report. It’s usually pretty minimal in content with an assumption I already know what they are thinking.

The truth is, I don’t know what the customer is thinking. I first begin by trying to understand the customer’s end goal beyond behavior. What is this behavior supposed to provide to the customer. This invariably uncovers a better goal for me to work for and to judge my work by.

Next, I want to provide them some kind of model of the thing they are looking for. Maybe a wireframe, maybe a base version of the feature that is very simple in their system. The simpler I start and the faster I get the feedback from them the better. If I can do that in minutes, that’s fantastic. That’s pretty rare, but I have done that before and it helps set directions very quickly.

I’ve done WAY too many projects where I spend a week or month or more where I have not consulted or shown the customer anything at all. This causes the customer to move to other things they are working on. They may not remember what they asked for, or I may have spent a lot of time producing in the wrong direction. This is always BAD.

Agile to me means at least in part, getting small pieces into the hands of the customer as quickly as possible and getting their feedback as quickly as possible to keep everything fresh in all of our minds and moving forward at a quick pace. This tends to make my customers feel listened to and part of the process. They enjoy working with me and I with them. Nirvana!