The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Stakeholder Demos

AUDIENCE

Product Managers, Whole Team

We keep it real.

Agile teams can produce working software every week, starting from their very first week. This may sound impossible, but it’s not; it’s merely difficult. And the key to learning how to do it well is feedback.

Stakeholder demos are a powerful way of providing your team with the feedback it needs. They’re just what they sound like: a demonstration, to key stakeholders, of what your team has completed recently, along with a way for stakeholders to try the software for themselves.

Feedback Loops

Stakeholder demos provide feedback in multiple ways. First, the obvious: stakeholders will tell you what they think of your software.

Although this feedback is valuable, it’s not the most valuable feedback you get from a stakeholder demo. The team’s on-site customers work with stakeholders throughout development, so they should already know what stakeholders want and expect.

So the real feedback provided by stakeholder comments is not the feedback itself, but how surprising that feedback is. If you’re surprised, you’ve learned that you need to work harder to understand your stakeholders.

Another type of feedback is the reactions of the people involved. If team members are proud of their work and stakeholders are happy to see it, that’s a good sign. If team members aren’t proud, or are burned out, or stakeholders are unhappy, something is wrong.

The people who attend are another form of feedback. If there are people ...