The Ikea Effect in Agile
This morning, I finally took the time to finish reading How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff. It is a well-written piece published by the Hustle about Ikea’s strategy to boost its furniture sales. If you’re a fan of Ikea such as myself, not necessarily a customer moreover a regular, I believe you are going to love reading the article. In fact, it has plenty of interesting stuff about Ikea that might make you love Ikea even more.
Among all those interesting stuff, 1 particular topic that pique my interest was the Ikea effect. As quoted from the article, the Ikea effect is “a cognitive bias wherein we place a higher value on items we build ourselves, regardless of the quality of the end result”. So, the Ikea effect is really about the impact of our involvement in building a product on how much we value that product. The keyword here is involvement.
I am reminded to the 2015 Chaos Report where Agile was deemed as helping to deliver more successful projects compared to Waterfall. Among the top 10 success factors for those successful projects, User Involvement ranked at 3rd place. There are more factors that is specifically relevant to Agile in that list, but let’s focus on User Involvement for now.
In all of the Agile-implementing projects that I am involved in, involving users during product development is vital. In all those projects, there was never once where users would only show up at the start of the project, i.e. during requirement gatherings, and close to the end of the project, i.e. during user acceptance test. Users are involved as often as possible. We listen to what they need, we respond to their feedback, and we build the product according to their actual needs. That is how we help users to produce something that is valuable for them.
On their side, it is always clear that the more they are involved in designing the product, the more they feel connected to the product. They are more active in delivering requirements and feedback and they feel more responsible about the end result. In terms of sacrifice, they put more of their time to meet with the development team and discuss anything required to move the product development forward. They don’t just stand there and wait for the work to be done to check and complain about the result.
As I said above, that sense of belonging, that feeling of ownership, that drive to sacrifice more for the sake of the product, exists in all of my Agile projects. Of course, the intensity varies between projects because there are definitely other factors affecting them. However, the Ikea effect is definitely there with the users or their representatives.
In fact, I saw the Ikea effect showing up in different circumstances, not just in Ikea or in any Agile implementation. Wherever I see “involvement”, I can see the same kind of effect towards product ownership and development. People will surely feel that they own something that they participate in building, even when their participation is limited to certain tasks. On the other hand, I saw no traces of Ikea effect where involvement is scarce, even in Agile projects.
So, in conclusion, the Ikea effect is a good sign for product development. That also means user involvement is important. It is a crucial part of building the right product. It should help steer the path of product development towards the expected destination. In terms of Agile, this simply means putting more emphasis on customer collaboration so that we’re not stuck with the mechanics of collaboration without producing any actual impact.
