Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 22]

If you are a designer you are probably interested on learning how to design experiences to deliver value to people.

All good right? Great.

I’m afraid you would be also interested to learn how to work in teams to co-create solutions or even harder, how to work in dev teams.

We work in world full of systems and the systems need a mechanism to make them work.

Some of us work on software development and we in somehow or another are being exposed to work in systems we didn’t create and we are not familiar with.

Why I never heard of it in the UNI?

Well, that’s true. We’ve been busy studying just design subjects and learning new design skills and that’s why some of us never heard about dev teams or how to work with them.

Agile — good or bad?

In software development we use some methods and processes to build systems. Some people like them other don’t but the reality is that we need to be aligned if we want to build things together on a team and we set processes in place to make it happens.

Dev teams are great to follow up stories and tasks and agile is a very good way to do it. As a team we can co-create and commit ourselves to deliver something in a certain amount of time.

We use standup meetings to follow up this everyday sharing experiences about what we have done yesterday and what will be the plan for today. Good visibility on everybody’s work and no blockers.

Designers and Agile

Designers have a different mindset when it comes to plan the journey or find it out how long it would take a discovery phase for example.

It’s tricky to mix our skill set within a very structured mechanism and that’s where Design Thinking is here to help.

Part of our job is to make sure that the user voice will be heard and that’s why we set up research plans.

Once we get that, we make the analysis with the team and make sure we are going to provide the right value to the right people.

Get your team onboard

Design activities tend to be disruptive and hard to measure but we can definitely do something more accurate facilitating some activities on a time — framed where we can definitely get all our team onboard and also proving some track o them.

Hopefully this tips can help you to frame it:

Use Design Thinking to facilitate instances where people can co create together and make sure all those activities has a ‘task’ on the board where the rest of the team has their tasks. Add and extra task to prepare de activity too.
In the activity, set up the scenario to talk about the Persona or the jobs to be done from an specific audience based on the research you did it previously. Make sure you have the following activities in case you need them.
From there, encourage the team to propose solutions to people’s problems or even creating new opportunities to improve some activities.
Think BIG, be creative and how we can bring BIG VALUE to our customers whenever they need to do ‘X’ or ‘Y’.

Once you have a clear big value to deliver, now we can start thinking on how can we split on small significant ones to be more agile and learn on the go.

From the Big Value

Well done, you helped your product team to create within cross functional people, the big value that you are thinking on deliver to your customers. Lovely!

Now, it’s time to make it happen. How we can move from the BIG idea to small chunks we can achieve in a certain amount of time, considering the learning as a fundamental piece of the process?

Let’s see an example here:

Small Values then

As a team you need to co create together small chunks of value you can deliver in short periods of time.

Following up the previous example:

Once you have some small chunks of ‘values’ to deliver to people then you can frame and plan your time accordingly.

You don’t need to have the full solution in place to plan about next steps but you need to frame it correctly, leaving the space in time to manage unexpected situations or even reactions to the values.

Be again, prepared to fail, thinking on new solutions and test it back.

It’s not a matter of the method

We can do it and actually it could possible forces us to be more accurate and creative reducing the risks of being out of topic.

Good luck and happy planning!

Are you agile?

Have you found agile a good or a bad thing in your organisation?
Do you work differently? Better solutions for designers?
Share your thoughts and we will be happy to spread it 🙂

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Natalia Rey — UX Designer at RedGate, mom of 2 little creatures & illustrator on her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Being Agile and getting your development team onboard was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being Agile and getting your development team onboard

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