From Customer Proximity to Enterprise Goals: How Agile Teams Perceive and Articulate Value
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Digital transformation and AI adoption are driving the need for agile, cross-functional teams to tackle complex socio-technical challenges. However, organizations often struggle to articulate the value these teams deliver. This study explores how such teams perceive, measure, and communicate value in a large-scale enterprise. Through an in-depth case study at a Finnish conglomerate, we analyzed data from value retrospectives across 61 cross-functional teams in retail, hospitality, traffic stations, and corporate functions. Using Socio-Technical Grounded Theory (STGT), we examined qualitative value retrospective outputs from teams combining business, customer, and technology expertise. The findings reveal that customer proximity influences value perception and measurement: teams closer to the customer quantify value more readily, while more distant ones rely on managerial support to align with enterprise goals. The type of team affects the types of values reported by the team more than the business domain. Our contributions include: (1) an extended value map categorizing perceived value types, (2) empirical insights on contextual influences in articulating value in software-intensive settings, and (3) practical implications for fostering value-oriented learning in agile organizations.