Lessons from the experiences of a hi-tech UX Designer
This is part of a series on UX Case Studies based on my experiences.
Communication is tough. Especially between people.
-Yogi Bera
Yogi didn’t say that. But he would have, if he worked in agile software development. Or if he were me. Brace yourself for a cautionary tale, not for the faint of heart or those overzealous for efficiency.
It all started on a glorious sunny, typical coffee-overdose workday. A Product Manager needed a new feature for a customer. I, loyal designer, studiously investigated the product requirements. Seemed straight forward enough. I crafted some detailed screens to represent the user interface part of the feature. Opened a story in JIRA and wrote up detailed ux requirements and a link to a prototype. Reviewed with product manager, who approved. Then as requested, assigned to the front-end dev team.
A developer said he needed an environment to work on this story, and it wasn’t working. His scrum master opened a bug to the relevant devOps support team, and put the front-end development story in pending.
There it sat, affixed in time. A day passed. A week passed. A month passed. A month! When I happened to inquire, I asked the front-end dev team Scrum master, whose reply: we’re still waiting for the support, for the environment. I turned to the manager of that Scrum Master for help. I pleaded, I begged, I supplicated: can you for the sake of what is good, please help move things forward? Fine, I just asked normally.
The manager said I should speak to the Product Manager. Why? To get her to light a fire, maybe raise the priority. Frustrations mounting, I did. The Product Manager thanked me for raising a flag.
Sure, maybe Designers shouldn’t go there. An argument can be made for leaning back. Waiting for work to find you. But if you’re a neurotic overachieving Type A eager to prove yourself, that’s unfortunately not an option.
So in parallel, I asked Scrum Train Conductor how this kind of thing should work. The Scrum Train Conductor said to tell the Product Manager to speak to the Product Owner of the Scrum master of the front-end dev. team, and to prioritize this task to the dev. team. That is the Agile way. This is ideal.
Ideal!?
When this happened, I was a designer. Since then, I have become a Product Manager and Product Owner. Now I know better. The Product folks maybe should have been on it, and followup up more vigorously. It is strange the lack of development — stuck in pending — went unnoticed for so long. Yet and though but, note the convoluted waste of breath. The he said she said. Telling someone to talk to someone, to talk to someone to talk to someone… It doesn’t take a communication specialist or founder of information theory Claude Shannon to cringe at this. Waste of precious time, energy, nerves, brain cells. And leaves ample room for the miscommunications of ‘broken telephone’ to creep in and further obfuscate.
How to fix it: move those lips
So beyond the actual organizational responsibility, what should have happened? What should happen?
Direct communication. If things are stuck, speak to a human. If that human can’t help, talk to the next one. Wash rinse repeat. It is undeniably excruciatingly painstaking to have to do this, especially if pushing the needle forward is not technically your responsibility. But it beats being stuck. It beats the cost of delay. It beats the cesspool of playing hot potato with people’s most precious asset: time.
Thanks for reading.
About this Series
This is part of a series on UX Case Studies based on my experiences.
About the Author
I’m a UX Designer turned Product Manager, with experience in startups, freelance, and international B2B companies. Writing helps me reflect & continuously learn. Connect with me on Twitter.
