Case study: Agile Leadership for UX

Boosting Collaboration with Effective Approaches to Asynchronous Sprint Planning

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How I approached the Product Design Lead challenge with agile methods

When talking about a traditional agile sprint inside a digital product, ceremonies are followed and a timebox is set for the team to finish the tasks. The product design team may also follow sprint strategies, but not necessarily alongside the rest of the squad.

The UX journey has to happen during the concept of a product, two or three sprints ahead of the development team’s, still being sure everybody is aligned throughout the process.

My Strategy Process

Synchronizing the expectations

I worked closely with the product owner, development team, and other stakeholders to ensure that the product design aligns with the product vision, business goals, and technical constraints. I also presented, alongside my team, design concepts and prototypes to stakeholders to gather feedback and ensure that their needs are addressed.

Here I described how to improve
a production flow, involving the team

Tool of choice

Using Asana, I created design sprint boards to facilitate collaboration and streamline our team’s workflow. Rather than adopting the traditional approach, I took a unique perspective and developed a clear and intuitive journey that serves as a seamless bridge between the product owner/manager and the product designers:

  • Discovery: When researches and benchmarks were set;

  • Ideation: The design thinking methods, coming up with pain points, solutions and target analysis. User testing, interviews and all the initial methods are here;

  • User journey: Studying the user’s mental model and aligning it with the business expectations;

  • Information architecture: Organizing all the elements needed for the product to be prototyped. This moment is when the Object Oriented UX processes can be applied;

  • Prototyping: Beginning of the prototyping-validation loop, from low to high-fidelity;

  • Validation: As the process goes by, more people are involved when validating a prototype, from stakeholders to developers, being sure everything is aligned strategically and technically;

  • Delivery: When the journey is ready to be delivered to the technical team to develop the product.

agile-ux-mockup

Does it end there?

Absolutely not. After delivering a product, a new journey has to be considered. What are the new pain points from the users who are going to first test that product? How can it be continuously improved? What are the new technologies, methods, processes and analysis that can be considered in a new feature or new project?

As a lead, all those questions have to be kept in a backlog, looking at all the delivered tasks, while helping the team also improving themselves as well, being sure nothing is being overlooked.

Thank you for reading my case study!

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