I saw this exchange on LinkedIn between David Pereira and Michael Küsters.
Here’s a snippet of what David said—
❌ Customers don’t care which agile framework you use
❌ Customers don’t mind how you work
❌ Customers couldn’t care less about your state of the art product delivery
✅ Customers only care about how you make their lives better—no more, no less
Are we sometimes or maybe too often missing the mark?
And Michael commented—
❌ Customers don’t care if you burn out your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you don't listen to your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you underpay your employees
❌ Customers don’t care if you fire your employees to keep more profit for yourself
The customer isn't everything. That's a dysfunction already.
✅ Customers will care if you treat people like people, with dignity and respect - because the service they'll get from such people is going to be different than the service provided by drones.
Later on in the comment trail, someone mentioned that you can do both—
Care about value creation and how you treat your people.
And I agree. But that statement puts the two on equal footing. However, that part I disagree with and want to prioritize one over the other.
I believe people should come first and how you treat your people drives the value that you create for your customers.
I realized that’s not what David was saying. But I wanted to lean into Michael’s perspective and amplify it a wee bit more.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
BTW: it’s worthwhile to read David’s entire post AND all of the comments.