Creating space for design in Agile

Working within an agile framework focused on fast and iterative deliverables, how can designers create opportunities for design thinking?

Co-written by Julia Lauer, Maddy Barr, Lauren Ciulla, and Conner Sinjem, from CIO Design at IBM.

Under its Chief Information Officer (CIO), Kathryn Guarini, the IBM CIO organization strives to create a productive environment for IBMers, while simultaneously deepening its Agile practices. But where does leading with design fit into this mission?

This question was posed to me and a few other designers, as we were tasked with identifying and addressing everyday pain points of designers embedded in Agile teams. What we discovered: design thinking and Agile methodologies are more aligned than some might think.

The pain points

Across IBM’s organization, designers on Agile teams reported a lack of time and resources dedicated to design at almost every stage of the product development cycle.

Designers said they faced difficulty negotiating time for the research and exploratory design thinking activities that ideally guide the early stages of product development. A majority — 62% — of designers reported feeling that their teammates didn’t understand the impact of this kind of discovery work on deliverables.

When asked about their everyday workflows on Agile teams, designers spoke about poor communication and a lack of clarity among business, development, and design priorities. They often regarded design thinking and Agile methodologies as separate processes that compete for prioritization.

Following a product’s initial release, 55% of designers said they experienced a de-prioritization of design within their teams — a shift that impedes designers’ ability to iteratively deliver user value.

The takeaway

Our research highlighted the prevailing view among IBMers that design thinking and Agile methodologies are opposing forces that fail to coexist as priorities within a team. Contradictory to the CIO organization’s commitment to leading with design, teams often forsake processes aimed at building deep understanding of users and their problems. Instead, they adhere to a rigid application of Agile measured by the successful and rapid delivery of feature implementations. This attitude not only creates difficulties for designers on Agile teams, but represents a true roadblock to successfully delivering user value.

Our work aims to challenge this status quo by introducing actionable methods designers can use to carve out space for their contributions and work more cohesively within an Agile framework.

Communicating the value of design thinking and discovery

One major challenge designers face while working within an Agile framework is advocating for time and resources for discovery work. The first step in remedying this is to ensure your team understands why discovery work is so important to the project.

Here are a few communication points to get the conversation rolling:

• “User research ensures we’re allocating our efforts to solving the right problems.”
  How can teams move forward with delivery when they don’t know where they’re going? Discovery at the project’s beginning allows teams to make informed decisions about which pain points they should aim to address.
• “Building empathy for users maintains our focus on the delivery of real user value.”
  A shared understanding of users and their goals translates into a shared vision of how to improve their experience. By taking the time to build personas, define users’ as-is scenarios, and identify their needs, teams can orient deliverables around the outcomes they want to enable, rather than specific feature implementations. This shift in perspective keeps teams focused on delivering real user value.
• “Discovery uncovers the user needs that help define our objectives and guide our prioritization of work.”
  With continuously growing backlogs, teams don’t have the resources to get everything done at once. MVPs need to be grounded in only what’s most important to users. Uncovering the capabilities that users truly need helps teams to move forward with enabling those outcomes.

Of course, why tell when you can show? Including your entire team in discovery work allows members to build empathy for users firsthand and foster appreciation for the knowledge gained from this work.

Here are a few suggestions to ensure you include everyone:

• Review your research plan with the team prior to beginning discovery work. Ensure you’re focusing on the right questions and that your team is aligned on the goals you aim to achieve.
• When doing user interviews, involve team members as note takers. Engage non-designers in empathy-building and allow your team to benefit from learning about users’ experiences firsthand.
• Play back discovery findings and artifacts to your team regularly. Facilitate group discussions around the insights you uncover and how they’ll inform your team’s next moves.
• During design reviews, highlight discovery findings that inform your design decisions and feature requests. Get buy-in from your team by taking the time to explain why something is important to a user’s experience.

Fostering collaboration, empathy, and alignment across Agile teams

Different roles within a team often have different priorities. Factoring in the various workflows, points of view, and requirements that exist on a cross-functional team, it’s easy to imagine that your idea of what needs to be done may not always align with everyone else’s.

When facing de-prioritization of design thinking work, ask yourself and your team why that’s happening. What other priorities exist? Where does design fit in others’ agendas? How can you frame design thinking work to help others accomplish their goals?

Start by understanding your teammates’ experiences. Ask a developer what their typical workflow looks like during a sprint. Schedule time with your product owner to learn what stakeholder demands are at play, or their long-term vision for the project. Just as building empathy for users better enables you to address their problems, building empathy for your teammates allows you to better advocate for design while demonstrating an understanding of the team’s experience.

You can even use design thinking to get team buy-in for design thinking. Here are two activities you can try:

1. Empathy to-dos

Create space for the different roles on your team to outline their tasks, timeframes, and circumstances that might affect their priorities. Open a discussion about where you can integrate design thinking and discovery work while considering what work the team is already managing.

2. Hopes and fears

Foster empathy among teammates by discussing honest expectations for what can be accomplished, as well as doubts about the team’s investments and expected payoffs. Having this conversation at the beginning of the project not only sets a precedent for honest communication going forward, but also establishes a foundation of mutual understanding for collaboration to flourish.

Integrating design thinking activities into an Agile workflow

You’ve advocated for the value of discovery work and fostered empathy for design across your team — now what? How do you execute design thinking in alignment with your team’s Agile workflow?

The image below outlines a typical Agile development cycle, highlighting at each stage the opportunities to leverage design thinking to help your team achieve its goals and deliver user value. Use this timeline as a starting point for integrating design thinking into your team’s Agile workflow. Tailor your design thinking toolkit to your team’s needs and ways of working — you may find certain activities prove more useful than others. Just as Agile is meant to be flexible in its implementation, design thinking should be used responsively, too.

Opportunities to integrate design thinking exist at every stage of the Agile development cycle.

Creating space for design thinking within Agile workflows is truly a win-win, for designers, cross-functional teams, and users. The two methodologies, when used symbiotically, benefit teams in their pursuit of delivering user value and working together seamlessly.

Note to IBMers: This article is based on an exposition poster featured at the internal 2021 IBM Spark Design Festival. Save the date, and learn more about the 2022 IBM Spark Design Festival (accessible only to IBMers) — happening June 7–10, 2022.

Julia Lauer and Conner Sinjem are UX designers in CIO Design at IBM, based in New York, NY; Maddy Barr and Lauren Ciulla are visual designers in CIO Design at IBM, based in New York, NY. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.