Why do agile teams need design?
What is the point of agile?
The concept of agile software development was invented by a group of people who hoped for better projects. In practice, it caught on around the world as an antidote to traditional linear development projects that took forever, ate up a lot of money and ultimately burnt out teams, but still failed to add value for customers.
Agile teams recognise their work so that they:
- create value for customers early and continuously by focusing on the goals that create the most value with the least effort
- constantly improve the way they work
This is done by building a work culture based on independence, trust and psychological safety that allows the team to reflect on their results and change their goals when necessary.
In Conclusion: A collaborative team focused on value.
How can it go wrong? Welcome to the feature factory!
In practice, the main reasons for an agile way of working are easily forgotten. Teams focus too much on the typical agile rituals and structures like sprints, scrum masters, product owners, kanban tickets and so on. While all these things can support effective teamwork, they do not make a team agile by themselves. If these structures and rituals overuse the meaning of agile, the team can turn into a feature factory. The following are the main points by which we can quickly recognise a feature factory.
- New features are constantly being released.
- No time to gather customer feedback or improve existing features.
- Goals are based on assumptions. No idea of what will bring the most benefit to customers.
- Goals are not aligned with customer needs.
Feature factory teams focus too much on developing products and not early enough on learning from feedback. In feature factory teams, the designer easily fights deadlines as a bottleneck before development work, with no time to learn or iterate from feedback.
Excellent agile teams may seem slower if measured only by output. But they are slowed down precisely by their strengths: cross-functional collaboration, learning from feedback and iteration.
They adapt to achieve the right goals and find the right ways to work together. In the end, they will create more value and bring out very good features that create a higher impact.
Design puts the focus back on customer benefits
Customer centricity makes a team more agile?!
When we know better what customers and end users need, it is easier to focus on the work that is valuable. But how does that work when developing complex and scalable products?
The long-term solution is to use customer-focused design experts as an integral part of the team. They make the team more agile and customer-focused by sharing responsibility for customer value with the product manager, spreading a customer-centric mindset throughout the organisation and championing inclusive and sustainable solutions that have a positive impact on the entire company.
Bringing together the individual strengths of design and agile enables the common strengths.
The strengths of design
- Taking a step back to see the big picture: Do we have the right goals? Are we solving the right problems? What cause-effect relationships in the system do we want to change?
- Understanding the needs of customers and end-users and the value that could be created. Sharing knowledge within the team.
- Creating completely new concepts to achieve the goals.
- Bringing ideas to life through visualisations and mock-ups
Strengths of agile teams
- Early and continuous value creation, starting from the things that create the most value with the least effort.
- Short learning cycles through continuous experimentation and feedback.
- Independent, diverse and self-organising teams whose culture is based on trust and psychological safety
Sharing strengths
- Focusing on customer value
- Cross-functional collaboration: working with team members and stakeholders from different backgrounds
- Rapid trial and error, learning from feedback and moving forward
Clarification of Terms
Customer
In this article we mainly talk about customer orientation and customer value. These terms refer not only to customers, but also to potential end users and other stakeholders.
Team
Team refers to all the people involved in creating a product for the customers and end users. Whether they are developers, designers, product owners, managers or other specialists, everyone is seen as part of the team.
Design
We do not draw boundaries between different design roles and designations (UI designer, UX designer, product designer, service designer, ...), as many types of designers are valuable members of a cross-functional agile team. However, we strongly define design by a customer-centric mindset and put it in the context of teams developing software as part of the service.
Agile
The word agile is a characteristic that describes certain software development teams. Agile teams have the autonomy to organise their work in short feedback loops that allow them to constantly evolve the way they work, learn from customer feedback and adjust their goals to maximise customer value.