Starting Together
Harnessing the team’s creativity and motivation.
Sequel 2 of “Looking for lean UX processes? Change your environment”
In the previous article I discussed how and where we should focus our attention when preparing initiatives. I described some measures that lead to unwanted consequences and emphasise the shift in mindset towards investing in initiatives. Another area where teams optimise their processes is linked to how they kick off an initiative and the boundaries they put in place to achieve their planned outcomes. This area is basically the aftermath of the preparation phase and, again, teams tend to introduce measures that look conclusive, but do in fact cause unwanted effects.
The core concept of starting together is a term I borrowed from John Cutler (read about it on his blog). But before we dive deeper into his concept, let’s have a look at which interventions we tend to introduce while kicking off a new project.
One measure taken as a consequence of preparation done with a lot of design beforehand involves getting started on the first tickets once an engineer is available. The thinking goes that ‘he/she could get started with task X, with others joining in once they finish their tasks’. It sounds smart as everything seems to be prepared and clear, right? It could even mean we have a week or two head start before even planning to start an initiative. Optimising for starting on engineering at any time reinforces the upfront design process since engineers can only get started at any time if the solution has been designed and all the details have been defined.
Another measure we tend to optimise for is removing all uncertainty and ensuring 100% predictability by conducting kickoff meetings weeks before actually working on something. It also sounds smart because in that meeting, we can address any unresolved issues and give the upfront design team time to clarify them. However, the team is generally busy working on other things, so pulling them away from those tasks isn’t likely to be welcomed with open arms. This also leads to loss of energy that a kick-off can give to the team building up to a new topic as it will still take some time for the wheel to actually start turning. Sometimes the upcoming initiative may even be turned on its head, meaning the whole kick-off was a waste of time.
A measure that can help break these unwanted effects, in turn leading to better processes, is ‘starting together’. The core idea is that the team comes together and experiences the defined problem space together for the first time. Here, work on the initiative starts right after a kick-off.
The benefit of starting together are the resulting effects as the team has to discover and learn, figure out a solution, maybe pivot at some stage, yet everyone is aware of why and agrees with the decision to do so. You could call this perfect alignment with no documentation needed.
What looks counterintuitive with starting together is the messy figuring-out phase that takes place early on in the project. The uncertainty at the beginning feels uncomfortable. To tackle that, we can rely on frameworks and methods like Design Thinking, Experimentation and Design Sprints to give structure during that phase and further down the road.
In my experience the transition to starting together is one of the hardest. It feels extremely unintuitive. Two analogies spring to mind that may offer more context here. First, let’s look at a newly funded startup. The founders naturally have to start together, going through the messy process of figuring things out until they ideally end up with a successful product. This environment is what makes startups so creative, collaborative and fast. The second analogy is related to football again. The starting whistle literally means starting together. The team faces their opponent, figures out if the planned tactics work and goes through the sometimes messy 90 minutes to win the game.
In the next article I’ll discuss how we optimise our processes during the delivery phase of an initiative to foster experimentation, learning and lean processes.
