We talked about internal stakeholders who need predictive visibility beyond what you would really want to do with Agile, and tactics and ideas to work through that. Sometimes, those stakeholders are big customers, and this happens all the time with companies I work with. They have a large company that they work with the customer, and they're used to getting detailed schedules, but the firm is trying to adaptively solve their customer's problem with Agile, so those big schedules would kind of kill that process. And so, what do they do? Well, in this video, we're going to talk about why this happens and what it looks like so that you can identify it and kind of understand maybe where it's going. And then, in the next video, we're going to talk about strategies to work through this with your big customer. Let's talk about why do big companies work with little vendors, well, the relative to them anyways. One is there's this basic economy of scale, they have a certain job that they need done, and they're a big company. They have some core business that's allowed them to get to that size, and you're focused on providing a very specific solution that you're totally focused on. There's this sort of basic economy of skill thing, which is why the software business exists. You have a certain expertise in today's hypercompetitive operating environment. You really need to be focused on your core business and be able to iterate on it and move really fast, and, likewise, you need capabilities that complement that. So, if your ability to be super focused on your problem area and executing at the cutting edge of what's successful and what's good practice in that area is important to them. Finally, it may just be easier for them to delegate this job to somebody else, they don't have to discuss it internally and make calls on it, and so forth. They can trust you that you're going to do the best possible thing for them, in whatever functional job you're slicing off and delivering for the big customer, and yet things can still totally break and they often do. Here's a kind of little narrative about how that looks, so you can identify this as it's happening. Big company has a meeting, and they say, well, we need software to do X, and it's not our core competency, so why don't we buy it from this smaller company, CleverSaas, Inc.? They decide, okay, that sounds like a pretty good idea, let's do it, and there's a project manager assigned to this inside the big customer that go to some users and say, we are paying a lot of money for this software. Is there anything special that you'd like to see? Big company user says, I don't really know, but I guess I should tell this person something, so they say, they should make all the buttons blue, and the project manager at the big company then says, all right, I'm going to go make it happen. He goes, or she goes, to the CleverSaas person, a smaller company that's supplying them the software and says, well, we've decided we just need all the buttons to be blue. You, let's say this is you. You say, well, look, let's talk about what problem you're trying to solve, why you want them to be blue. Maybe I can give you some better ideas from what we've learned out in the field, and they say, look, you want your money, you better give me these blue buttons, and you need the money so you say yes. You're not able to work with them on a problem-focused way to work through this issue, this problem, and so what happens? Well, you go now to your developer, let's say this is you, you're the, let's say, product owner person that interfaces with the big customer and brings items to the Agile team. You say, there's no really good reason, but we have to make the buttons blue. Now this kind of breaks your whole Agile plumbing, and the team members say, all right, well, I'm not doing what I think makes sense anymore. There's no narrative behind this, all this stuff that we decided was important, and things that made our product work well are kind of out the window now for this feature. Obviously, they're going to struggle, anybody would, to go after with the vigor and insight and perspective that they have normally, so they're going to struggle. They're going to do the best they can, but you're ultimately going to probably just focus on doing literally whatever it is that they said in this situation. So they get this back, this is them, they go to the user. The user says, well, it's okay, but I don't know, I don't really like the blue buttons because this didn't make sense in the first place, so this is bad and this keeps happening. Eventually this whole thing will come full circle, and whoever had the customer decided to buy this software, they have this meeting again and they say, I heard all the buttons are blue, and they suck now, and we don't like the product. So, this is a kind of a little bit of exaggeration and hyperbole around this, but the purpose is to show you the kind of bad way that things can go, and things like this happen all the time. So, how do you avoid them? That's what we'll talk about in the next video.
