Agile Design Execution
Introducing design into the agile development process is not always easy. Sometimes designers does not have an agile background, and product owners and engineers does not have clear expectations about design deliverables. This often leads to parallel reality design, where design is researched and prototyped but not immediately executed by the engineering team.
UX is a hot topic for every large enterprise, but the design execution is often lagging behind the corporate messaging.
With the recent opportunity of building a brand new product, we were able to find the dialogue between product, design and technology standpoints and ship working product in just 8 months within large enterprise environment of CA Technologies.
The Team
For distributed teams, mutual understanding of what we are about to build and acceptance of our own strengths and weaknesses is more than any formal process.
Initial face-to-face communication was great to build the right amount of excitement for a new project. It was also a way how we transferred from uncertainty to challenge. In fact, solving problems that we don’t know the solution yet is fun.
By applying Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design, we make sure we stay focused on our Persona goals by defining Scenarios — description of an ideal experience when using our product.
Design Framework
Once the dust settles, the team needed to spend research spikes on new technologies and initial design framework. Some call that Sprint 0, but this activity exceeds time reserved for just one sprint.
When the time pressure is high, people start to think that this is something that should be done in advance — before sprint development starts, before engineers are involved — and they look at designer to deliver a prototype of the future product.
In reality, designers needs to work in iterations, the same way as engineers. We learn as we go and solve problem by problem. At the beginning we know least about the solution, so attempting to build full prototype or wireframe leads to parallel reality deliverable– something that will either never be shipped in the form as displayed, or will end up being something different after a spiral of constant re-works.
We rather focused on defining design principles — key aspects that define the product navigation, content structure, and general interaction framework.
MVP
Once the creative problem-solving process was established around clearly defined problem, we needed to pause and take a deep breath to define what product experience we can ship under the tight deadline.
Version 0.5 was a result of very tough negotiations between product, design and engineering to make sure we are able to deliver enough value for customers, provide right experience and build necessary engineering infrastructure at the same time.
Sprint
We executed all the design within the agile heartbeat — in sprints. Only after we agreed on design framework and MVP scope, we started to build wireframes and detailed prototype of a future product.
By making design part of the sprint execution, we make sure that design is focused on pressing issues and producing right deliverables that are needed for ongoing iteration.
As addition to engineering team’s daily stand-ups, we established daily design meetings. While the involvement of Product Owner, Product Designer and Engineering Manager is required, individual team members attend depending on the actual topic.
Together we make sure that design is just 1 step ahead of actual sprint implementation. That step is always smaller than the next project milestone or release.
Validation
Getting continuous user feedback on enterprise on-premise app is not easy. People need to invest a significant portion of their time to download, install and configure the app and even set up whole sandbox environments just to be able to run it.
By engaging with our beta community, we were able to quickly ship the first version to pilot users and by sharing our design story, we generated right attention so that we were able to receive valuable feedback.
Conclusions
I found agile sprint design execution to be the primary factor in successful design delivery. Fast iterations were driven by the daily collaboration of a small design executive team, equally covering all three standpoints — Product, Design and Engineering.
I approached design as one coherent problem-solving discipline, and in every iteration I worked on every aspect of design — from interaction design and diagramming through data visualisations to visual design and branding. The same multi-discipline approach of engineering team enabled us to have fully working product increment at the end of each iteration — something that works and looks as intended.
Design is a team effort and our collective team spirit of making important design decisions and tradeoffs quickly, we managed to keep project scope right and deliver high-quality product design.
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