6 Steps to a More Agile Small Business

I love the idea of using the Agile model to design, test and refine new ideas. Whether it’s new customer solutions, or entirely new business models I return to Agile again and again. Perhaps that’s because I worked as a software engineer in the ‘90’s when every project took an estimated 18 months. Actual time usually took another 18 months because of project creep and because we added a bunch of features that seemed cool to us. It took three years of hard work before we could show anything to our customers and when we did, inevitably we got something wrong. At a point when we wanted kudos for our time and effort, all we heard were criticisms.

Agile was developed in 2001 by the software industry to address this problem. Instead of building a fully featured system before showing it to customers, you create the smallest possible standalone system with the goal of gathering customer feedback early and often. While it still might take three years to build the fully featured system, the output of all of that hard work delivers something the customer loves. Now 15 years later, Agile is showing up across businesses and industries, and even being applied to personal projects. It’s time to put the power of Agile to work to achieve your business goals and deliver more value to your customer next year.

Agile Model for Small Businesses

The Agile model is especially important for small businesses because you’re watching your dollar carefully, only investing in those endeavors that yield a good return and increase the loyalty of your customers. Yet many small business owners get stuck behind a wall of too many good ideas and not enough bandwidth to implement them. Wouldn’t it be great to look into a crystal ball that told you which idea deserved your energy? Agile can help with that. It’s a customer driven process, guiding the investment of your precious time and money to those ideas that provide the most return on your investment as determined by your customer’s feedback.

The Agile Manifesto includes the principle of Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of value

Here are some ideas for how you can use Agile to improve the service you deliver to your customers today:

1. Build your customer journey map to capture the highs and lows of each step in your customer’s journey
2. Select one of the lows and envision an idea for something you could provide that would alleviate that pain point
3. Spend 2 weeks, and only 2 weeks, implementing your idea, at the end of which you have something you can test with your customer
4. Put it in front of your customer to get their feedback and listen carefully for how this solution provides value for them. Is it different than what you envisioned? What else is missing to make it a complete solution?
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you answer the last question as follows: “Nothing is missing – this solution provides value that my customer will pay for”
6. Launch your new service!

A Few More Tips

A couple of thoughts as you work through this process. Your first “solution” might be just a concept on a piece of paper. That’s okay, you should still test it with your customer. Even better – show them the pieces of the solution and ask them to put it together, identifying what is missing. One of the core concepts of Agile is to identify and get rid of the bad ideas quickly. So don’t worry if your first attempts are throw away. Another suggestion – be sure to capture the value statements from your customers. Besides building a new service offering, you also want them to clearly articulate how the service brings them value. That way you can use their language to sell the service to other customers.

Use these steps to systematically work through solutions to all your customer pain points. You will continuously improve your business, and your customers will reward you with their loyalty.

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