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by rocqua 492 days ago
Sprints should give natural points to present to the end-user. Presenting to the end user is essential to getting feedback, and getting feedback is essential to building something the end user will actually use.

You can get feedback without sprints. But they make it easier, and encourage getting something in front of a user fast.

2 comments

In fourteen years I've never seen a scrum project that includes user feedback.

At best it led to a stakeholder demo where some business people would look at a form or something, ask some minor questions, then a new cycle would begin (with its context switching, planning stress and perverse JIRA games - all the negatives of Scrum).

I don't think many companies use such regular user feedback in their development process.

Perhaps it's that they don't need to? I actually think a lot of company dysfunction happens when the "official" system purports one set of goals (user feedback, regular pivots) but the "real" system purports others (executive driven initiatives, long sales cycles)

Most of the scrum projects I've worked on have been for mass internet users, where feedback came in the form of AB test results. Our current scrum process includes close review with customers, albeit not on a strict two-week/sprint basis.
On this project we're presenting to users two to three times a week -- not to the same user, the most frequently that we demo to a single user is about every two weeks, but there are a few we exchange notes with weekly.