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Guest View: Customer confidence hinges on agile schedules

By Lisa L. Morgan

October 1, 2010 — (Page 1 of 2)
I recently co-authored an industry report for marketing managers that probably won’t appeal to you unless you’re managing paid search-marketing campaigns. But since you’re spending most of your time creating software, you may be interested to know that even marketing people can tell the difference between software companies that have adopted agile development practices and those that haven’t.

The report, entitled “The 2010 PPC Management and Optimization Report,” was produced by PPC Summit. It is really a buyer’s guide, but it also has a lot of analysis and identifies a number of trends about pay-per-click marketing. One of the things that struck me as the principal analyst was how obvious agile development practices are becoming to the average business consumer.

Most of these non-technical observers talk about agile development in terms of its effect. They’re noticing that some platform providers are rolling out releases every two weeks while others are rolling out releases maybe one or twice per year. The paid search platform providers who have adopted agile development practices are seen as more in tune with customer requirements and also more in tune with Google’s constant modifications to its algorithms.

The difference in release schedules is affecting software provider preferences and, ultimately, sales.

Agile development is also affecting customer loyalty. No one wants to be aligned with a dinosaur, particularly when the part of the industry you’re working in is moving at light speed.

Customer loyalty also plays out in terms of customer requirements. Since the dawn of software, users have always had something to say about how it could be improved. The difference is, more agile tools and platforms are allowing companies to more easily adopt and prioritize customer requests if not transform them into stories.

Some of the marketers interviewed for the report were flattered and impressed that their platform vendors were actively listening to them, and even more impressed when the vendor had morphed one or more of their requests into product features. For the less egotistical, the new features were the sign of a good and dedicated business partner. For the narcissists, it was like a Windows 7 commercial. “I’m a PPC (marketing manager) and I invented [my favorite platform vendor].”

Related Search Term(s): agile

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Comments

10/08/2010 02:11:39 PM EST

Hi Lisa, this is an interesting article. As you mention, agile is becoming more and more prevalent in industries other than software development. Just like how HTML code spread from the tech world to the average Joe who wants to make his own website, agile is expanding to the world at large. And with this spread of knowledge comes the awareness of what happens when agile methods are absent from software development strategies. A company that isn’t automating deployments, for example, will quickly fall behind on deadlines and deliverables, succumbing to the many problems that agile shops can avoid. Do you think that deployment automation and agile will continue to expand from the software development industry?

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