The Liberators Podcast
This is the podcast of The Liberators. Our mission is to unleash organizations and teams all across the globe from ineffective product development. We rely on insights from scientific research as much as possible so that you don't have to take our word for it.
In each episode, we look at the challenges faced by Agile teams, software teams, and product teams. We discuss relevant research, share our experiences, or challenge existing beliefs. Each episode ends with practical and actionable recommendations on what you can do with your teams.
Most episodes are written and presented by Christiaan Verwijs. Our music was written and performed by Jasper Huiskamp a.k.a. Basanite. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp. The music for episodes before 91 is licensed from Yummy Sounds.
The Liberators Podcast
How To Sell Agile To Your Customers
How do you sell Agile to your customer?
"One of our biggest customers preferred the traditional way of doing projects. This boiled down to writing a massive requirement document, estimating the hours the work, and translating that to a fixed budget. We would then set a deadline and get to work."
And this is understandable. From the perspective of the customer, this gives them the guarantees on budget, date, and scope they need to sell the work internally and to their own management, who in turn demand similar guarantees.
The irony of course is that, despite these guarantees, the scope inevitably changed during the work anyways. After all, those new ideas emerged if we wanted to or not. And in many cases, we simply made incorrect assumptions in the requirement document that we based our estimates on. So we had to move deadlines, request additional budget, and frequently covered overly optimistic hour estimates on our part with our own money.
As a wise person once told me after a feverish attempt to sell Scrum to them: “don’t sell me the hammer, sell me its benefits”. This was an important learning moment for me as I realized that I was explaining how it benefitted us, but not necessarily the customer. So what benefits does Agile offer to the customer?
A transcript is available here:
https://bit.ly/36IKBOB
Become a patron to support and participate in our work:
https://www.patreon.com/liberators
We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com
Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com
The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.
