If your Product team utilizes a Scrum workflow when it comes to product development, you might be hesitant to introduce a tool like Receptive into the mix.
Fortunately, Receptive is extremely flexible, and you are able to adapt it into any and every workflow you use.
With that in mind, I thought I’d map out how Scrum teams can use Receptive to help them make smarter product decisions, and ensure they’re building the right things.
Sprint Planning
The Sprint Planning stage, where you decide what you’re working on for the next sprint, is the perfect time to use Receptive.
Once you’ve settled on a goal, you can use Receptive to research around it and make sure you have all the information you need to achieve it.
Let’s say, for example, that your goal for the next sprint is to improve your UX. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of ideas of your own that you should consider, but you also need to think about what your users want from these UX improvements.
Instead of seeing your Receptive requests as a product backlog, you should see them as a library, which you can explore as and when you need to.
In this example, you can look at any requests relating to UX. This will give you an idea of the sort of things you should be building, or at least taking into account, for your next sprint.
If there isn’t enough information, then you can use Receptive’s flexible emailing feature to ask for more.
Once you have enough data you can decide what to build in the upcoming sprint.
Sprint Demo
While the Sprint Demo is primarily concerned with reviewing what you’ve shipped during the sprint, so that everyone knows what’s happening, it’s also a good opportunity to invite customers to beta test any new features and improvements.
You can do this by sending out a flexible email to everyone interested in the requests you’ve been working on, including a link to a demo of the new feature.
Your customers will love that you’ve included them, and they’ll happily help you out by spotting any bugs or things that don’t quite work.
Once everything you’ve built during the last sprint is completely finished (yeah, like any product feature is ever completely finished!) then it’s time to let everyone know.
You should change the status of any requests to “Released” and make sure to explain a bit about the new feature or improvement in your release notes.
This way any user that wanted the items you’ve been working on will be notified and they can go and check out all your hard work.
The Next Sprint
Of course, with a Scrum process, the hard work doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve got your Retrospective out of the way, it’s time to start planning for your next sprint.
Luckily, Receptive will be on hand to help you all over again. Simply work out what your next goal is going to be, use Receptive to research around that goal, and then get building.
Receptive can be plugged straight into your Scrum workflow, without having to change the way you work, enabling you to continue building and shipping product improvements, while being 100% sure that you’re building what your users want the most.
