Agile Adventures: Transforming Product Strategy in Biometrics Tech
📍Context:
📆 Years: 2020–2021
🗂 Project scope: Product Strategy, Process Improvement, Design Sprint Pioneering, UX Lean, Agile
🎯 Teams: Design & Marketing, Growth dept.
⏱ Timing: 3–6 months
The Problem
Many companies face similar burdens: unclear processes, messy communication, and a lack of a unified vision. These obstacles can hold back a company’s growth team, slowing progress and stifling creativity.
The Impact
The story dives into practical ways to tackle these challenges head-on. It emphasises the importance of building a dynamic product team, embracing agile methods like Scrumban, and weaving UX practices into the organisation. I’ll introduce handy tools like the “assumptions board” and a design thinking framework. I’ll show how these strategies can spark real change in the product development process. By adopting them, we could shape a clearer company vision, prioritise user needs, and foster a culture that values user experience.
This article refers to product designers, managers, and professionals across various industries, whether small startups or big corporations, facing similar situations.
📍Joining Biometrid: Navigating Initial Challenges
In March 2020, I joined Biometrid — formerly known as Polygon — a biometrics tech startup building identity verification solutions for high-security sectors. The environment was fast-paced, the product vision fragmented, and the team struggling to connect design, product, and engineering in a meaningful way.
As the first product designer in a company primarily focused on engineering, I was brought in not just to design screens — but to help structure thinking, clarify direction, and plant the seeds of a product strategy from within.
My initial step was to familiarise myself with my colleagues, understand our existing design processes, study our design libraries, identify the developers responsible for code delivery, and collaborate with the marketing team to grasp project KPIs and business expectations. Unfortunately, what I found was a landscape:
☹️ lacking structured processes,
☹️ and an alarming void of communication between design and development teams.
While this initial assessment might seem disheartening 💔, it presented a unique opportunity. In the dynamic environment of a startup like ex-Polygon, still finding its footing, I saw the potential to shape a brand-new process from scratch 📈.
Building a Cohesive Design Team
It’s important to note that the designers in my small team were mostly early in their careers, with some yet to delve into UX. I dedicated time to understanding them better through shared learning experiences, working together to ignite their awareness and skills. I encouraged them to ponder their career paths: Should they aim for versatility as UX professionals or specialise in specific areas?
During this phase, we were all on a journey of growth and discovery together.
Embracing Scrumban
As a newcomer to agile methodologies, I eagerly sought guidance from Fabio, our Tech Lead, who skilfully orchestrated the development team’s efforts using a hybrid approach called Scrumban — a blend of Scrum and Kanban. The design tasks were on the same board as development and machine learning tasks and were composed into user stories by Fabio.
Consolidating user stories from various departments onto a single board is not inherently flawed; however, it is better suited for companies with a mature UX culture. Our design team had not yet reached the level of maturity required to seamlessly integrate with the development team’s fast-paced and intense workflow. Furthermore, the user stories, written and managed by Fabio, were predominantly tech-oriented. They did not adequately consider the intricacies of design thinking or the specific challenges faced by users.
As a product team, we were missing:
❌ a defined process,
❌ clear roles,
❌ organised ceremonies,
❌ and a cohesive voice throughout the product development lifecycle.
Do these challenges sound familiar to you?
At this point, my interest in UX strategy began to grow. Jaime Levy, in her book, explains that UX strategy involves strategically applying UX practices within an organisation or specific business unit. This includes assessing and improving the team’s skills, increasing their influence, and prioritising projects to maximize return on investment (ROI). My goal shifted towards integrating UX into the agile team and, more broadly, promoting a UX-centric culture throughout the company.
📍Unresolved Issues 🚨
🔸 Development decisions were often driven by stakeholder preferences, with little consideration for user needs.
🔸 Interdepartmental communication gaps led to frequent delays, increased costs, and subpar user experiences.
🔸 The layoffs of at least ten colleagues, spurred by financial constraints, underscored the necessity of providing concrete proof of ROI to investors.
So,
How do you motivate colleagues when they feel intimidated by higher-ups?
How the small design team can convince the company and stakeholders to align on a shared product vision?
📍New process — new boards
Adopting an open-minded approach required a stroke of luck, tangible results, and the support of a few influential colleagues willing to embrace change and experimentation. Ricardo and Fabio rallied behind me, although it took considerable effort to win them over. Initially met with scepticism, my proposals for change pumped into questions like, “Why should we do this?”.
What it means to become an intrapreneurial?
As mentioned earlier, winning people over requires effort. Proposing validated user research or creating MVPs for testing during the design phase was often dismissed as impractical in corporate settings.
It was a moment of frustration.
I decided to persist and not let down. We studied each product, conducting design audits, discussing heuristics with colleagues, refining user flows, mapping out techniques, and crafting a concise design system tailored to our products. We formed a small yet adaptable team proficient in user research and interface design.
Until then, our approach felt like a feature factory — prioritising feature building over addressing user needs.
I aimed to pivot towards a faster, more iterative, flexible, and efficient design process.
Adopting the Assumptions’ Board
While our sales team consistently generated valuable feedback and innovative ideas from client demo sessions daily, unfortunately, these insights often became lost in our day-to-day conversations on Slack, emails, or buried reports in Google Drive. Understanding the importance of giving these ideas proper attention, I set up a knowledge board on Jira.
This board became a central hub for collecting all the assumptions and ideas from the business side and sharing them with the product team.
The knowledge board facilitated meaningful discussions among all teams and allowed us to get feedback and, if approved, smoothly integrate these ideas into our design plans.
The Assumptions board is essential for bridging our Business Model with our UX strategy. Many parts of the Business Model Canvas emphasise the importance of teamwork and communication during the early stages of understanding our customers. We needed to figure out
🔹 who our customers are,
🔹 how we reach them,
🔹 what makes our product valuable,
🔹 how we make money,
🔹 and how to build relationships with our customers.
How we formed the design sprint
Recognising that the standard five-day sprint was not enough for our design team, I was determined to ensure they had enough time to do their best work without being overwhelmed.
One of the strengths of Lean UX is its flexibility. Unlike rigidly structured processes, where each phase depends on the previous one, Lean UX allows us to adapt and allocate time-based on the project’s specific requirements.
Next, we will see how it works.
📍Adapting Sprint Ceremonies 🏆
I’ve opted for Staggered Sprints to stay ahead of the development cycle by completing designs one or more sprints in advance.
Staggered Sprints involve a sequential process where teams complete tasks in a specific order, typically with one group completing the initial task before another group begins theirs.
We’ve embraced this approach due to the significant design challenges that demand a thorough understanding of complex business issues and require additional time.
Boosting Backlog Creation
Within our backlog, we categorise tasks as follows:
- UX Dept tasks: These are tasks essential to the overall quality of the product. For example, they may include minor visual enhancements or updates to design systems, introducing new component variables.
- Buffer tasks: Buffer tasks are our contingency measures for instances when specific tasks unexpectedly require more time to complete. These tasks help maintain workflow efficiency.
- Design spikes: Design spikes are dedicated to mid-project discovery work and can interrupt the regular sprint flow. They address concerns related to upcoming stories. Importantly, non-dependent development tasks can continue alongside design spike sprints.
📍Outcomes That Mattered
Within a year, we moved from chaos to clarity. The product vision became co-owned across departments, feature delivery aligned more with user needs, and stakeholders began using our UX artifacts in their own presentations and pitches.
Even more importantly, designers were no longer seen as “pixel pushers.” They became strategic partners, empowered to challenge assumptions, shape roadmaps, and lead cross-team initiatives.
📍Looking Back: What Agile Really Meant for Us
This journey wasn’t about applying Agile by the book. It was about making Agile fit our context, our people, and our culture.
It taught me that transformation doesn’t come from rituals alone — it comes from building trust, encouraging curiosity, and designing frameworks that work for real humans, not ideal ones.
If you’re navigating change in a similar space, my advice is simple: don’t rush to copy methods. Start by understanding what your team actually needs — and build from there._
Cheers,
Sonia
