I’ve worked on many projects and several different software development teams in the past, and these teams have had great success in applying Agile best practices in their work. Unfortunately, the integration of UX processes into the Agile methodology is not always successfully achieved. Hence, here’s my thoughts on how Agile and UX can best partner to produce features that customers use and love.
Tactical: Setting the right balance
Many teams leverage UX resources only to inform product roadmaps set by product management – using research and testing to help decisions and set direction. In other cases UX resources on Agile projects are effectively “order takers” – reacting to user stories and creating designs for development to support backlog items.
I think the best approach is to ensure UX is properly leveraged and balanced – equal partners in product management and the development effort.
When it comes to product management, UXers should partner with the Product Owner and product managers/stakeholders to ideate and new features and research customers to make certain the product backlog is driven by actual user needs. This, in turn, will inform the product roadmap – at least, an indicative one.
A key approach in this effort is to leverage Design Thinking Workshops to generate ideas that can be tested BEFORE any development work commences. This was the cadence I established for the Innovation Team I helped found at Fiserv (as well as how we worked with customers at Microsoft), and it was quite successful. New feature ideas, generated internally or through DT workshops, can be validated with users before they are formally added to the backlog.
Regarding development, we need be fully engaged in the sprint cycle – support development questions/asks, work one sprint ahead, and remove blockers that are UX related.
There are regular spikes that prevent development work from being estimated and completed – these are often UX related questions or areas that require user research and direction. Optimally these spikes can be worked on before they are estimated and built for the next sprint, and when it IS UX related Uxers should own that work.
Finally, during sprint planning and backlog grooming UX can partner with the whole team to identify focus areas that require design activities.
Strategic: Building out standard capabilities and processes
In each team I’ve managed or mentored, I always tried to build a playbook of capabilities UX practitioners can bring to the product development lifecycle. Such a playbook would have details of the approach as well as specificity regarding dependencies, LOE, and deliverables.
Each capability UX can provide should be specifically detailed regarding:
• Description (what is the activity)
• Value proposition (why the activity is important)
• Resource Needs (How many UX people, partner resources, etc.)
• Timelines and Milestones
• Outcomes/Deliverables
This way expectations will be set properly for all – stakeholders, team member and the UX team. I always try and “timebox” each capability to no more than two weeks worth of effort, to align with a typical sprint.
Some “candidate” capabilities:
• Design Review
• Accessibility Audit
• User Research – Interviews
• User Research – Ethnography
• User Research – Focus Groups
• Usability Testing
Things to look out for
Getting executive buy-in: UX professionals need to focus on only the activities that will have the most impact when it comes to shipping a quality product. What is a quality product? One that increases revenue through improved usability and responding to actual customer needs. This will mean doing activities (such as research) that may not show an immediate benefit. You will need executive support to ensure that these activities can occur.
Resetting expectations: Doing high fidelity concept designs to get the PMs to signoff on a design is not the best use of anyone’s time – and that is what is often done in Agile teams today. UX practitioners need to embrace “true” agile approaches at iterative designs and do detailed design AS NEEDED to support development of the right experience. We don’t ship wireframes or Sketch files – we ship code.
Content strategy: Content (help copy, tips, feature descriptions) is a core part of any experience. Any UX Team also need to properly partner with the people doing this work to ensure we can influence this content in a positive way.