Skip to main content

What is the difference between Customer and End Users?

By
In a lot of IT projects, Customer and End User contains the same group of people, even if in realty they are different. Because of this, we can end up very easily into a conflict between different scopes.
In today post we will take a look about the Customer and the End User of an application. We will try to define and discover what the similitudes and difference are between them.
The simplest way to describe this two roles is:
  • Customer: relates to the development process
  • End User: relates to product and services
TIP: You should never be end-user-driven, otherwise the customer will look as a ‘not team player’ – heathen person.
End User consumes and needs services brought by the product that you develop. For them, the application itself and the services/features from it bring the real value. In general, the source of revenue for customer is the end user that pays for this product. And in the end this feeds also the development team.
We can see a Customer, as a middle man between End User and development team, because they are not the consumers. In the same time, they play a crucial role. You shouldn't imagine the Customer as an external company, but is important to not have the Customer concept in the development team. We should have different teams and people. If we have the same people/teams we should keep in mind what is the role of each of them.
A customer can be seen as the role that takes the risks. For example he can identify a market opportunity, a lack of specific service. In this case he will risk and invest money in it. In this situations, Customer interest will be around development costs and delivery time. As software developer, you would expect a Customer to have a high interest in the functionality also, but usually the interest is not at the same level as costs and delivery time.
Because of this, the Customer should be involved in all process improvements areas (like retrospectives). His interest around development is not as high as we may expect.
In conclusion, we could say that customer is oriented to delivery, costs and processes. End User is oriented to application and what features are offered to resolve their problem (need). Knowing exactly who ‘plays’ the role of Customer and End User, we (as development team) can know exactly to witch role address different questions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Database Modernization Matters for AI

By
  When companies transition to the cloud, they typically begin with applications and virtual machines, which is often the easier part of the process. The actual complexity arises later when databases are moved. To save time and effort, cloud adoption is more of a cloud migration in an IaaS manner, fulfilling current, but not future needs. Even organisations that are already in the cloud find that their databases, although “migrated,” are not genuinely modernised. This disparity becomes particularly evident when they begin to explore AI technologies. Understanding Modernisation Beyond Migration Database modernisation is distinct from merely relocating an outdated database to Azure. It's about making your data layer ready for future needs, like automation, real-time analytics, and AI capabilities. AI needs high throughput, which can be achieved using native DB cloud capabilities. When your database runs in a traditional setup (even hosted in the cloud), in that case, you will enc...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

[Post Event] Azure AI Connect, March 2025

By
On March 13th, I had the opportunity to speak at Azure AI Connect about modern AI architectures.  My session focused on the importance of modernizing cloud systems to efficiently handle the increasing payload generated by AI.
Post a Comment
Read more