Finding Team Harmony by Reframing User-Centered Design as Agile

The largest gap between designers and developers acting as a single team has been at the intersections where “specifications become solutions”. The reason is that the two disciplines have not always had a shared understanding of key factors and constraints that drive the work. This incongruity between views and approaches further exacerbated retrenchment and distrust as each side has struggled with whether they were valued by “the other side.” We discovered that in order to fully embrace an integrated team framework, design teams and development teams needed a shared understanding of the new model of digital product delivery. To find that understanding, we needed to find the root cause of the friction and help our teams see the benefits of another path to success.

a. No Longer Us vs. Them

As referenced above, traditionally the design and development functions engage in a client/service model where the designer orients to the problem as the “solution” expert and the developer plays the role of the engineer. A decade ago this model made a lot of sense because organizations were making investments in technology with an absence of understanding of customer experience and no underlying platform architectures to build on. But today, things are different. Software and technology is built on top of core…