The Agile Methodology of a Large Experience Design Organization
Once a month I lead a training session at Wayfair called “Working with Experience Design.” This is one of 16 training sessions attended by a cohort of experience designers and product managers who are new to Wayfair. These sessions are meant to give new team members a well-rounded understanding of the ins and outs of our product organization.
Explaining Wayfair’s Experience Design (XD) methodology is time-consuming. While co-workers are my typical audience, I’m often asked to explain this methodology to curious third parties. I now explain it so frequently that I occasionally pause to question whether or not I’m repeating content to my audience, or if I’m experiencing déjà vu. To save myself time — and sanity — this article will serve as a replacement for me explaining our methodology live and in person.
Purpose
At a high level, the purpose of this methodology is to establish and distribute a 👉 shared 👈 Experience Design process that each scrum team can utilize on project work.
How this benefits our scrum teams:
- ✅ Uniform onboarding for product managers & experience designers
- ✅ Singular vocabulary
- ✅ Easier team shifting
XDs don’t need to learn a whole new process if they move from one team to another. - ✅ More accurate experience design project planning
Since we work dual-track agile, being disciplined with planning and scoping design epics, stories, and tasks enables us to have a good idea of when our engineering partners can begin their work. - ✅ Resource constraint visibility
Building an accurate design backlog enables us to identify teams who may need to recruit more designers.
How we built it
📓 Stakeholder Interviews
Ironically, we used the basic Design Thinking methodology to structure the planning process. During the Discovery phase we held focus groups with each of our design teams to document the process they were currently using, and what was/was not working.
📚 Literature Review
We canvassed the landscape of existing design methodologies to give us a broad range of potential directions to go in. There was no reason to start from scratch, so we cobbled together pieces from multiple resources that work best for us.
📏 Experience Design Leads Alignment
Over the course of months, the appropriate experience design leads met frequently to align on all aspects of the methodology. We eventually came to a consensus on a number of methods that can work across teams.
Our Approach
At a high level, we decided to go with a process that incorporates aspects of Design Thinking and Lean UX.
🧠 Design Thinking @ Wayfair
Design Thinking was popularized by The Stanford d.school and IDEO. The names of each of the five phases of design thinking vary depending on your source. Rather than adding to the confusion, we made the decision to normalize the phase names into something that incoming team members would have a decent chance of being familiar with: Discover, Define, Ideate, Refine, Analyze.
👟 Lean UX @ Wayfair
Design Thinking is useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined¹. However, this level of in-depth analysis can be time-consuming and is not appropriate for all projects. Most of the projects at Wayfair are fairly well defined. In these cases, we utilize a methodology that is a derivative of Lean UX.
So, What Is the Definition of Lean UX?
Inspired by Lean Startup and Agile development, it’s the practice of bringing the true nature of a product to light faster, in a collaborative, cross-functional way. We work to build a shared understanding of the customer, their needs, our proposed solutions, and our definition of success. We prioritize learning over delivery to build evidence for our decisions.¹
🔨 Roadmap Building vs. Roadmap Execution
Whenever we do a proper Discover phase, it’s likely in the service of roadmap building. Day-to-day, most of our time is spent on roadmap execution.
When roadmap building we spend time empathizing with our users to then inform a hypothesis. During roadmap execution, our previously established hypotheses serve as the start of the project.
When roadmap building we leverage more qualitative data to inform a future roadmap. During roadmap execution, we leverage more quantitative data to quickly validate and iterate on the current project.
Our Process, In Practice
🚂 Dual Track Agile
Now for the nuts-and-bolts of how this methodology works day to day. As discussed in our post about team structure, each scrum team at Wayfair has a dedicated designer. The design and engineering team members on each scrum team work Dual-Track-Agile. Designers will generally be a full sprint or more ahead of their engineering counterparts.
Dual-Track Agile is an IT development methodology where figuring out what to build is as important as the building process. You start with a discovery track to find out if a product idea is good and if it makes sense to build. Successful findings from the discovery track are added to the backlog of the delivery track. Source
♾ Agile Design Ceremonies
Grab a cup of coffee, because this is about to get super granular. Below is an outline of the recurring agile design ceremonies scrum teams practice each sprint. We work in two-week sprints, so these meetings occur once every two weeks. Not every Wayfair scrum team utilizes this exact methodology, but each one does use the same general recipe.
Ceremony 1: Experience Design New Project Scoping
T This ceremony is likely the most valuable of the bunch. Once each sprint, the experience designer and product manager from the scrum team meet to discuss new projects to add to the backlog. The value comes from the alignment that takes place at the outset of the project. If they are aligned on the purpose of a project and its success criteria, aligning on a solution will be far less subjective.
Meeting Details
- Participants: Single scrum team experience designers and product managers
- Meeting Details: 45 minutes each sprint
Tasks:
- For new projects, experience designers and product managers collaborate on a document we call an Experience Design Project Canvas. It’s derived from the Lean UX Canvas technique but includes the linear phases of Design Thinking. The basic purpose is to ensure all of the design methodology phases have been properly considered for projects large and small.
- Create and scope the necessary epics/stories/tasks for the project
- Estimate the number of points (days) each story or task will take
- Add projects to the backlog
What’s with the points?
Agile teams commonly measure the amount of time it will take to complete a story or task in points. While this may seem like busy work, there are very real benefits to completing this step. Primarily, it enables the team to have a good understanding of the effort each initiative in the backlog will take. This enables us to project the amount of time it will take us to work through each design phase, plan out future sprints, and understand whether or not scrum teams are staffed appropriately.
Ceremony 2: Experience Design Group Backlog Grooming
TThis session is similar to traditional agile backlog grooming, but focuses only on experience design projects. It also broadens the audience to multiple scrum teams. Bringing together multiple teams enables designers to have insight into initiatives that their peers are set to begin working on. This allows us to pressure test approaches, share insights into similar projects that may have been completed by other teams, prevent conflicting experiences, and lend a helping hand to teams who have resource constraints.
Meeting Details
- Participants: Experience designers and product managers from multiple scrum teams
- Meeting Details: 20 minutes per team each sprint
Tasks:
- Each scrum team walks the group through the Experience Design Project Canvas of new projects, seeking feedback on their approach and scoped points.
- Each scrum team re-prioritizes their backlog, taking into account newly added projects.
Ceremony 3: Experience Design Group Sprint Planning
TThis sprint planning meeting is also a slight deviation from traditional sprint planning. Instead of scrum teams individually planning their upcoming sprint, experience designers from multiple teams gather to do it together. Typically in groups of no more than 6 scrum teams whose work streams are interrelated (we have 50+ scrum teams in total). This gives each scrum team visibility into the projects their peers are about to start working on. This helps each team avoid designing conflicting experiences.
Meeting Details
- Participants: Experience designers from multiple scrum teams
- Meeting Details: 45 minutes each sprint
Tasks
- Run through the projects from the previous sprint to determine if any need to carry over into the next. This task keeps experience designers accountable for the accuracy of the points they originally scoped and their productivity during the sprint. It’s not effective for our design teams to measure velocity, so this step is necessary to ensure we’re being productive.
- Add new projects into the sprint from the backlog. As projects are added, the appropriate design describes them to the group.
- Continue assigning new projects until each designer has reached their point capacity. If one scrum team is particularly overloaded with important work, experience designers from other scrums teams can lend a helping hand by donating their capacity.
- Points can also be assigned on initiatives that are not related to the scrum team — things like design system upkeep, education, and year-end peer reviews.
Ceremony 4: Project Kickoff
AA successful kickoff meeting is crucial to avoid conflict among project stakeholders later on. At Wayfair, these kickoff meetings will likely always include experience designers, product managers, engineers, and data analysts. Depending on the initiative, kickoffs may also include stakeholders from merchandising, shipping logistics, marketing, etc.
Meeting Details
- Participants: Single scrum team experience designers + product managers + engineers + others
- Meeting Details: 45 minutes on each project
Tasks
- Schedule the kickoff meeting as early in the sprint as possible. Be sure to invite all the necessary stakeholders.
- Walk through the Experience Design Project Canvas for the project. Align on outcomes by allowing all stakeholders to add their assumptions to the canvas.
- Align on next steps, when the follow-up meeting is, and what that meeting will cover.
Tools & Techniques
As Experience Designers, we have an exhaustive amount of techniques, tasks, and deliverables we could utilize on any given project. We spend the majority of our hours in a sprint working on these activities. Some have very broad use cases and will be used on nearly every project. Others have very specific use cases and will be used rarely. To help make sense of it all, we’ve assembled documentation that outlines the ones we use most often, and which Design Thinking phase they’re most often used in.
In the majority of cases, we have a good understanding of the tools & techniques necessary to complete each phase of the design process and don’t need to consult this documentation. We tend to reference it if we’re having a difficult time deciding which activity to utilize next. Designers with less experience also tend to make more frequent use of it.
Final Thoughts
🚨🚨🚨 This Methodology isn’t a Checklist
It’s more of an encyclopedia. It’s something to utilize if you’re new, stuck, or if you need to pressure test if a project is going in the right direction. Think of it like a restaurant menu. When you go to the Cheesecake Factory, you don’t order everything on the menu. You (ideally) order just enough to satisfy your appetite. So don’t boil the ocean. Only do the minimal amount to learn something.
