Transitioning from a waterfall to an agile thinking can
be very hard, and there’s nothing harder for some people
than to understand how innovation works at an agile shop.
Receiving feedback from your customers on a feature you’re
working on because they asked you too is usually easily
understood, but what about Research & Development?
The answer to that is pretty simple: get your customers
on board!
Talk to a few of them, the most involved ones, new customers
even, and see if your idea for the next feature could help
them. Your customers shouldn’t always be the ones asking you
to implement a new feature or solve a problem they have.
The next question, harder to answer to, is: “what is
then the priority between regular work and innovation work?”
I think there shouldn’t be a priority between the two, because
if you get your customers on board with your innovation work,
it’ll become regular work. The business value of R&D will get
higher because now the people paying for your product want
the new feature you’re talking to them about.