The Google design sprint framework is a five-phase framework developed by Google that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. The design sprints let teams reach clearly defined goals and deliverables and gain key learnings. According to Google, this process helps spark innovation, encourage user-centered thinking, align teams under a shared vision, and get faster to product launch.
If some consider Scrum as an Agile project management framework, many people consider that is is more a product management approach. Anyway, Scrum is about understanding the need of the customers to deliver value. In this context, the concept of “personas” can be used to support user-centered design throughout a product development cycle by focusing on the characteristics of key user segments.
DUCAT is a free assessment and benchmarking online tool that aims at creating awareness for user-centered agility and enable companies to easily assess the status of their projects. The tool provides a 360 degrees assessment to investigate the team’s perspective and process. These results are completed with the users’ evaluation of of the product.
Agile has become the de-facto standard for innovating new products in software development. But an Agile project needs good product management and good UX design to succeed. Fitting UX in with product management and Agile can be uncomfortable for UX designers. Once you get it, though, you’ll never want to work any other way.
One of the important concept around Agile and Scrum is that it is more important to build the right product than to build the product right. Impact Management is a framework that helps managers to focus on impact of an idea and a product. In her article “Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery”, Ingrid Domingues explains how to brings together Scrum and Impact Management in software development projects where design is important.
We’ve all been there. You release a new feature, product or service, only to find it isn’t quite what your customers want or need. But by the time you release, it’s too late to make significant changes. Traditionally user experience design has involved a significant amount of upfront user research and design, to ensure we build products that meet customer needs. But this approach doesn’t always work so well within an Agile development environment.
Carbon Five has been using Agile XP from our very beginnings 14 years ago. Six years ago we started on a deep dive into Design Thinking inspired by collaborations with the Stanford d.school. We then extended those learnings, integrating Lean UX techniques, to help our clients focus the team’s development power in a direction more closely aligned to a viable product market fit.
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