XPM is a component of eXtreme Marketing which in turn is a technique used within Agile Marketing.  XPM is relevant to any product development situation, although it has it’s roots in software development.  The idea behind XPM is the development of small sub-modules of the final product that are developed in such a way that they can be shown to both the internal customers (marketing and management) and the external customers (end users).

Focusing on small incremental and functional deliverables creates an environment that shows continual progress which is important in maintaining forward momentum and excitement in the program, but more importantly it provides a method for getting rapid and continual feedback from the customer as to the fit and finish of the product AND how well it meets their needs.  Doing this creates an environment where feedback occurs early in the development cycle which in turn improves the end product and allows for incremental corrections at a low cost (where such corrections may be prohibitively expensive downstream).

The effectiveness with which XPM gets implemented is totally dependent upon the infrastructure that is set up to provide appropriate and rapid customer feedback.  I’ll talk about this topic in my next blog.