10 ways LEAN UX boosts value in Scrum

SCRUM & LEAN UX | Episode 2

UX covers every aspect of a person’s interaction with an organisation, its products and services. Inspecting and understanding these aspects well will help product developers increase the value of that experience.

LEAN UX promotes a set of principles. These principles will:

“help you build a product design organisation that is more collaborative, more cross-functional, and a better fit for today’s agile reality.” — LEAN UX, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.

Starting with team organisation, LEAN UX guides teams to be cross-functional, co-located, self-sufficient and empowered. What’s more, it’s all designed to serve high quality outcomes at maximum value. This truly is serious stuff that by no means is easy to achieve. It’s Michelin Star Kitchen level stuff. What is served is an art and a high-end experience.

It isn’t served if it isn’t right.

The value of LEAN UX

Traditional UX activities generally revolve around creating by-products such as exhaustive wireframes, interactive prototypes, marketing personas, user flows and customer journeys. These are generally created by UX Designers working in silo’s and in pre-production phases.

LEAN UX focusses on maximizing value and reducing waste. Less time is wasted on the pre-production of by-products. More value is gained through collaboration between specialists and involvement of customers and end-users. It revolves around injecting evidence-based decisions based on customer data into development. It considers learning and development to be ongoing activities that run together as an integrated track within a single team.

In UX Design the title of UX Designer is commonly used along with (but more rarely) that of UX Developer or UX Engineer. In Scrum we are addressing Product Development. When the words “develop” and “development” are used in the Scrum Guide, they refer to complex work, Product Design, UX Design and UX Engineering included.

What value would UX Designers or UX Engineers add when they perform within the cross-functional Development Team in Scrum, applying LEAN UX as a strategy?

In the upcoming episodes we’ll dive into each of the 10 listed benefits of practising LEAN UX as a Scrum Team and how to put this into practise.

1. Connecting the Scrum Team more closely with end users and customers.
2. Facilitates activities that improve collaboration within cross-functional teams.
3. Building research into every iteration: injecting evidence-based decisions based on customer data into development.
4. Value learning over delivery.
5. Support the Product Owner in making better decisions.
6. Aligns team priorities around problem-solving not feature-building.
7. Encourages to think about the outcomes to achieve.
8. Encourages creativity and exploration which creates a larger view of the work beyond features.
9. Creates an environment in which it is safe and valuable to fail.
10. Reacting to evidence quickly.

Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum with User Experience is an excellent training for everyone who works on or with a product or service team. It has motivated me to embark on a new journey with Scrum Teams discovering better ways to maximize value, which I will share with you here at Serious Scrum. Likewise, please check out LEAN UX, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. It’s the go to guide to practise and achieve these 10 value boosters in Scrum.

Continue reading:

Connecting more closely with end users and customers

Thank you Paddy Corry and Willem-Jan Ageling for reviewing this series.

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