Agile Principle 1: “Our Highest Priority Is to Satisfy the Customer Through Early and Continuous Delivery of Valuable Software”

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Developers and customers have different definitions of what constitutes value. You learn what “value” means to your customer by bringing her together with your team. You accomplish this through dialogue. The dialogue generates clarity of requirements and a common understanding of the process. Developing software that satisfies the quality, speed, and value expectations of customers is what matters most. This is what customers want and need, and this is what they are paying you for, so this is what you as the leader must deliver. Leaders of agile software development teams know that this is far easier said than done. It involves dialogue, iterative development, risks, and failures. Vignettes from leaders at Nokia, UScellular, and Centene Corporation illustrate these leadership challenges and how to address them. It begins with dialogue. You as the leader bring your agile software development team together with the business owner to establish and execute a sustainable, repeatable process for prioritizing requirements, defining what will satisfy the customer and how the customer will use the software solution, and defining what the customer deems valuable. The objective of joining the teams and executing the process is to generate solutions. Leaders overcome challenges by implementing a repeatable and sustainable process for generating solutions. Teams must agree on what “valuable” means and what “continuous” means. Answers aren’t revealed. Rather, solutions are generated, and they’re generated through dialogue.