A Case of Doing Discovery and Delivery Iteratively Hand-in-hand

Many years ago, I worked as an internal Agile coach in a software development company and have been asked to help a team build a large new product feature using Scrum. I was glad to have the opportunity as it was quite challenging with many unknowns.

To understand more about the context, I had a chat with the product owner. She shared with me that the feature had been delayed for about one year because it required lots of customer research in order to explore the right solution. They required an iterative approach to build it but they didn’t know how to do both discovery and delivery parallel.

I didn’t have the answer at the beginning but liked the challenge which was new to me. We had a few more discussions about how they would do discovery. So, the first thing they would do was to map the end-to-end user journey about different scenarios. Then they would choose the most critical scenario to design more detail with mock UIs and recruit users from the community to do user testing. Their previous approach was to complete all the user testing across all different scenarios first so they could finalize the requirements based on the user testing results. Then they would hand over the requirements to the development team to build.

To co-create the Agile approach, I gave her an introduction around Agile and Scrum and helped them understand the benefits of getting real user feedback through a workable product every iteration. Both of us felt that it could be…