It's not just Agile projects that need to watch out for the Toy Shop. But especially Agile developers should be heavily aware of the dangers of letting your users into the Toy Shop.
What Toy Shop? The Toy Shop of all the beautiful things that you could do for your users. We all know that given time, you can make whatever is needed. You're a skilled software developer, and your team can produce anything. You are flexible and good at your work. So, you invite some users and show them what technology can do for them these days. They get all excited and start dreaming about all these exciting new functionalities and how brilliantly they could use that in their work.
After some time, your limbic system begins to activate the defensive systems of your body. In defensive mode, you try to point out to the users that of course you cannot implement everything: it would cost years of work for the whole team, and you need to do lots of other work too. Sure, the users understand. But their limbic system is also activated by now, albeit in another mode. At the end of the meeting, everybody goes their way. The developers already have a feeling of helplessness ('so much work, so little time'). The users, well, it depends. If you're lucky they have experience with this sort of meetings and have developed a skeptic attitude ('we never get what we want anyway'). Even worse is if the users go away in an enthusiastic state ('wow, that looks good!').
The next months you experience the true kick back of this meeting. Whenever you deliver something, the users are visibly disappointed with such a basic, un-slick product. You worked your butt off, and all they can think of is that they would want much better stuff. This demotivates both your team, and the users. Being professionals, your team finishes the project with things that are OK, and better than anyone would have thought at the start of the project. But by then, your good developers are leaving ('bloody spoiled users here') and users are grumbling ('as always, we get the inferior stuff'). Management says the project hasn't failed but there will be no extension.
There is BTW an alternative route: this is when y'all are not so good developers after all. In such environments you see nice screen shots appear in project meetings. Many of the toys seem to be made! Unluckily, when it comes to delivering the actual software, for some reason the 95% ready state remains 95% ready - indefinitely.
Agile needs lots of communication with users. Guided communication. No toy shops. Limit brainstorming to what you need to know. As soon as your users start moving in the direction of the toy shop (or worse, come to you with their shopping lists), stop them in any way you can. It's hard to find anything more demotivating for both developers and users than the effects of the Toy Shop.
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