Product Thinking & Customer Behavior
Agile teams thrive by focusing on value, but value is subjective. These laws help teams think like product strategists, understand what motivates customers, and distinguish between demand, satisfaction, and usability. By applying these principles, teams prioritize what matters, design with empathy, and align delivery with real-world outcomes and evolving customer needs.
| Concept | Agile Relevance | Usage in Agile |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework | Focuses on the progress users seek by "hiring" a product to fulfill a specific job in their life. | Guides Agile teams to define value through customer outcomes, improving backlog refinement, prioritization, and validation practices. |
| Law of 3 | Highlights the cognitive power of offering three focused options. | Helps Agile teams frame product choices, priorities, or strategic options in a way that's easier for stakeholders to grasp and act on. |
| Golden Circle | Centers team purpose by focusing on Why before How or What. | Strengthens Agile alignment by connecting product goals, team practices, and delivery outcomes to a shared purpose. |
| Kano Model | Helps categorize customer needs into basic, performance, and delight factors. | Guides product discovery and backlog refinement by helping teams balance must-haves with unexpected value. |
| Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) | 80% of outcomes come from 20% of inputs. | Encourages Agile teams to focus on the highest-value features, customer segments, or bottlenecks for disproportionate impact. |
| Fitts' Law | Describes the speed-accuracy tradeoff in human interactions with UI elements. | Supports Agile UX design by advocating for accessible, intuitive interfaces that improve task efficiency. |
| Zeigarnik Effect | People remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones. | Informs backlog management, nudging teams to finish started work (WIP limits, small stories) to reduce mental overhead and user frustration. |
| Law of Triviality (Bike Shed) | People give disproportionate weight to trivial issues over complex ones. | Warns Agile teams to avoid wasted time on low-impact decisions during planning or Retrospectives by focusing on what truly matters. |
| Lindy Effect | Things that have lasted tend to continue lasting. | Encourages respect for mature tools, design patterns, or customer behaviors that have proven resilient over time. |
| Miller's Law | People can hold about 7±2 items in working memory. | Promotes clarity in story writing, UI design, and prioritization by limiting cognitive load on teams and users alike. |
| Shalloway's Law of Requirements | Requirements that can be misunderstood will be. | Reminds Agile teams to write acceptance criteria, testable examples, and clarify assumptions to prevent costly misinterpretation. |
| Krug's First Law of Usability | "Don't make me think" - the core principle of intuitive design. | Supports Agile's iterative delivery of simple, usable features by encouraging obvious navigation and clear actions. |
| Van Rest's Law | Most users only read 20% of content on a page. | Drives product teams to front-load value, use scannable interfaces, and trim unnecessary copy to improve engagement. |