Lessons from my experiences as a UX Designer
Learning from experiences at an international B2B SaaS agile company.
How to Design in Agile has come up since I started as the first full time UX Designer in a mid-sized B2B SaaS company that uses JIRA within SAFe, the scaled agile framework. The vagueness of the question begs a wishy-washy answer, so let’s break it down:
- How should User Discovery/Research work in an agile organization?
- How should Handoff (Product → Design → Developer) work in an agile organization?
- What’s are some good ways to communicate UX requirements?
- How should final design approval work in an agile organization?
- How should project management software be set up to support organizational workflows?
This list of questions is not MECE (mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive), but not a terrible starting place, either. I address each question in a separate article, and share things I’ve tried, things I’ve heard, and some points to consider.
The Context
Let’s start by setting the scene. Imagine you are hired as the first full-time UX person (‘UX Designer’, ‘Senior UX Designer’, ‘Principal Designer’, whatever) in a mid-sized international B2B SaaS company. After some time, you assume responsibilities of a Product Manager for a core product related to a user interface. You get to work on current ‘legacy’ products, and also brand-new ones. The technological ecosystem is complex. The users are industry experts who rely on advanced systems to work effectively within said complex technological ecosystems.
By ‘Agile organization’, I mean loosely: striving toward implementing SAFe. ‘Ideologically’ that means trying to deliver value to customers via MVPs that we iterate on & improve upon. And methodologically, using SAFe rituals, ceremonies and techniques like software release trains with Release Train Engineers, Planning Program Increments (PI) using WSJF, dividing PIs into sprints, doing daily standups, demos, having a bunch of the defined organizational roles (Release Train Engineer, Scrum Masters, Product Managers, Product Owners…).
Each question is explored in an article. But don’t expect a straightforward & conclusive ‘best practice’. Probably always “it depends.” But hopefully I can share what worked better, what worse. And full disclosure- there are definitely folks with more experience than me on these subjects. Consider these meditations works in progress, and take them with a generous grain of salt.
Happy reading!
About the Author
I’m a UX Designer turned Product Manager, with experience in startups, freelance, and agile B2B2C companies. Writing helps me reflect & continuously learn. Connect with me on Twitter.
References and more
See Jeff Gothelf on this topic — https://medium.com/swlh/here-is-how-ux-design-integrates-with-agile-and-scrum-4f3cf8c10e24
