Scrum Master + Designer — a partnership with vast potentials

Harvesting the potential of Design in empowered interdisciplinary teams goes beyond implementing processes — a new mindset is needed to perform Design as a team sport.

We have all read the books, studied the diagrams, watched the talks on how UX Design and Agile fit together.

A lot of designers have had mixed experiences working within an Agile team and although books like Lean UX have offered a healthy model for balancing the two fundamental modes of working — Discovery & Delivery — it still puzzles a lot of designers (and agile teams) out there how things can fit for them.

Reality is, bringing a multidisciplinary team to perform the intricate dance between discovery and delivery, in the right measures, shifting tempo when necessary, between reflecting and making, is not to be achieved by laying down the rules and hoping for the best. Another diagram is also not going to help much.

In the worst case, being a designer in a team of engineers and data scientists makes them just one lonely voice in the room and somehow the worst experiences that agency sided designers had working for clients are now repeating within the team itself.