The designer’s fallacy
I read an interesting article the other day, outlining the ‘fundamental flaw of agile'. The premise of which seemed to be that the problem with agile is that it’s so focussed on building features, that designers don’t have time to ‘design’.
Although there are many problems in this article, there’s one quote that I’d like to single out for special attention.
30% of our engineering effort is wasted on re-work!
Now, this is someone that just proved they have not discovered a flaw in agile, but in the way that designers think about how or why work gets done.
Re-work is not waste. You learn from things you’ve built, and build upon that understanding.
If re-work was wasted work, then design would be considered a very wasteful discipline. Not to mention that, by this authors example, the objective would be to do more rework than new.
I understand this misconception. It stems from the days when design was the part of the operation that was ‘cheap’. Cheap in the sense that you could crank out drawings on a hundred bits of paper, before committing to the expense of producing a massive print run, or building a skyscraper. Even software development in the past was cheaper to do in theory, than in practice.
However, modern software is pretty cheap to produce, and you can have the benefit of your research being done on real customers, not in artificial environments. Not to mention that if your customers are buying a product, then you’re actually bringing in money, as well as spending it.
The author is right about something, not agile, but about company culture. It can be easy to fall into the trap of being a feature factory, especially when the product is new. It can be hard for designers to promote a design story over one that might be perceived as adding ‘more’ to a product.
However, I frequently see company cultures where it’s easy for designers to separate themselves from the team, sitting in ivory towers, moaning that if only the navigation system was different, all the customers would be happier.
In agile, every piece of work should aim provide value. If it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be done. When reviewing the backlog of work, evidence should be provided to justify the likelihood of that work making the product more valuable. It’s in this review that the value of user research and design thinking should promote a story from backlog to sprint.
It is the job of the product owner to balance the need for new features vs improvements on existing ones, and it’s the job of the team to get the most value out of any work. Designers, engineers and product owner must be prepared to be part of that team, and work together.
