Product Steering Groups – Integrating Developers and Customers

By Ian Burgess On July 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment · In Agile, Best Practice, Diary, Software Development

Hawthorn small Product Steering Groups Integrating Developers and Customers Had a long day at the end meet up with Fellow IBC member Brendan Walsh when among many things we ended up discussing the culture that exist with in software companies and the internal value sets that grow up around that.

Brendan has worked in training and the development of client focused cultures for a long time, I won’t win any friends by elaborating on that too much. while I revel in the culture that has grown up around developers being valued based on their creativity and in many cases pure Genius that has in so many software cultures created an almost “Rock Star” type of environment.

Where the internal value of developers has grown in many organisations and this is a well deserved position it is often unfortunate that they don’t interact well with customers effectively. This lead to a discussion on the use of Agile Metaphor and several other collaborative practices which include the involvement of the customer.

During the discussion I touched on many of the practices which I have found to be extremely helpful in bringing the development team and the customer team together in to a single project team, but for the this blog I am only going to touch on the Product Steering Group which is used by many software companies around the world.

Product Steering Groups

A project steering group is made up of members of the customers and developer teams, together they discuss the product and possible functionality that will enhance the product in the future. The regular meetings place the developers and customer together which helps to build a relationship and shared understanding for the project.

The key to a successful Product Steering Group is to begin with exercises that build communication with individuals with in the team from both the customer and developer groups. The task and objectives have to be relevant to the development of the Product, it is key that these are usually run by a good Facilitator who will help to use these task to bring the team together.

When moving on from the group formation process it is also important to have the management and facilitators step back and allow the team to begin to develop. The group dynamics allow for the development of a better product and increase the understanding of the users requirements, when correctly facilitated it often leads to further development of the individuals that are involved.

In almost all the current projects that I am working on we are using customer involvement and I strongly believe we are developing better software as a result of it.

You can contact Brendan Walsh by email on brendanwalsh@hawthornbusinessgroup.co.uk

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