Shared Understanding is the Currency of Lean UX
Communication style is essential to all collaboration. It is through this lens that I come to understand Lean UX today.
Prior to pivoting into design, I observed from the sidelines how technical teams worked to ship a product. Nowadays, as a designer, I’m part of the product creation and delivery and have come to understand what my technical colleagues were up to as they collaborated on sprints.
The Basis of Lean UX
Shared understanding is the currency of Lean UX. Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and a greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
At its core, Lean UX is founded upon user experience design, design thinking, agile development foundations and the build-measure-learn framework wherein a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the end result.
From this foundation, Lean UX provides a framework that governs the design process, team culture, and team organization.
The design process is driven by these principles:
- Work in small batches to mitigate risk
- Continuous discovery
- GOOB or Getting Out Of the Building
- Externalizing your work
- Making over analysis
- Getting out of the deliverables business
And these principles act as a north star for team culture:
- Moving from doubt to certainty
- Outcomes, not output
- Removing waste
- Shared understanding
- No rockstars, gurus, or ninjas
- Permission to fail
Lastly, team organization is guided by this philosophy:
- Cross-functional teams
- Small dedicated, co-located
- Self-sufficient and empowered
- Problem-focused team
The Lean UX Advantage
Bringing it all together, Lean UX results in 2 main advantages.
- The ability to learn continuously and quickly understand how a company’s product is meeting customers’ needs.
- Raising customer expectations in terms of product quality and company response times to the user’s concerns and feedback.
Most importantly, the Lean UX framework is a new way of working that is not expensive, and it’s available to all.
Lean UX allows a team to focus on delivering outcomes and value, rather than delivering features. Through rapid testing and iteration, the team then has access to more market feedback, which reframes design conversations in terms of objective business goals. This allows the team to measure what works, learn, and adjust rather quickly. Unsurprisingly, daily continuous engagement is key throughout this process, allowing a team to strip away heavy deliverables and the time required to create them in favor of techniques that build shared understanding in teammates. No one is ever working in isolation.
It is this type of framework that allows companies like Amazon to push new code live every 11.6 seconds. They are iterating so quickly that they’re in the trailblazing role of discovering their product at the same time they are delivering it.
Lean UX in Practice
So if shared understanding is the currency of Lean UX, and anyone that has access to the Lean UX methodology can implement it, what does implementation of Lean UX look like?
Here at theCOOP, a small and mighty remote team of 13 designers and engineers work from 11 am — 3 pm ET on weekdays. We start off with a daily team stand-up that leads to individual design and engineering stand-ups. The team works in 2-week sprints and design kickoffs are every Wednesday. For planning, the kanban method is utilized, and collaboration is plenty with communication happening via Slack and Zoom, in duos and in larger groups.
Lean UX looks different based on context and environment. However, the key to its philosophy is the ability to mold the framework of Lean UX into any team, company, or product while keeping communication at its core.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll discuss theCOOP’s Lean UX practices in depth.
