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

Hi girls and guys 👋

First off, if this is not your immediate reaction, you might want to get your self checked out by a professional. This it’s long and quite self indulgent, sorry.

It was nice of you to pop by and I completely understand the urge to skip the ramblings of a semi-dyslectic Norwegian with no sense of prose.

I am Norwegian, it’s in my nature to belive no one will read this

If you for some reason want to continue this journey, be warned! From here on out there are no answers, only my thoughts on the subject, questions I have and a description of my workflow. That might not be anybody’s cup of tea, for all I know.

Long story short, I am looking for advice.

How does a small startup with one designer (with all that entails) organize a well-oiled process around design-driven and agile-driven product development? And what does that look like?

Hold on to your monitors, we are going for a ride.

A year ago I took the leap from an in-house designer in a cosy but god-damn-frustrating big Corp. to the only designer in Differ a new and exciting tech start-up. Not the point of this story, but…. good choice me ✋💥✋ (that was the sound of me high fiveing myself)

We have grown a couple of people in that year and it looks like we will continue that trajectory. Hello, growing pains! I do a little bit of everything now and that’s part of the fun, but there is a fair amount of friction in our process at the moment. It seems to me that a lot of the friction is in the intersection of design and Agile. I have tried to find articles about this, but most of them are very generic. Summed up they all circle around the same themes; stay a sprint ahead of development or do Kanban. Well, that’s all fine and all, but what does that actually mean?🤔

So many questions

This is basically my internal monologue these days:

How do you fit long term research on a subject that you haven’t even begun thinking about solutions for into Agile? Or do you?
How do you handle feature requests, both from existing users, potential costumers and within the team?
How should my workflow be to best handle strategy, marketing, product design, research, two development teams, a little bit of front end work and all the ad-hoc stuff?
How should we set up our project management tool (we use Jira) to work with the design workflow, development sprint board, feat request and roadmap?
Should I be part of the sprint? Or what should be part of the sprint?
How do you fit jobs to be done into agile?
How much charge of the product direction should I take (We currently don’t have a PM, the CEO fills that role now with input from everyone)
How do you get out of the MVP-all-the-things spiral?
And the million dollar question, how do you balance it all?

Workflow

For the sake of transparency, here is my/our workflow at the moment:

Research

Usually the CEO and I plan this when we are heading down a new path or have opportunities to talk to people about specific subjects or tests we do.
We base these interviews on several things, like the jobs to be done framework and follow-ups from social experiments we do within our apps. This is not in the project management tool at all, I have it as a task in my personal Todo-list and in our shared calendar.

UX/UI/Product design

Based on what we find in the interviews, assumptions we have, feat. request, customers request, etc. we make epics on topics we want to find solutions for. Inside these epics, we have used straight-up features but we are trying to move towards job stories (an alt. to user stories).

One feature/job story may take this “exciting adventure” through our process:

The core team agree on a scope of an issue ->

If it is a small task we feel we know enough about:
Low-fidelity sketches <- I iterate until team agree -> test on team ->
high-fidelity <- I iterate until team agree -> test on team ->
and we skip user-testing.

Oh yeah, we’re craaazy!

If we don’t know enough about how the users will react to it we:
high-fidelity prototype <- I iterate until team agree -> test on users.

On one card in the design kanban board I specify the UX with sketches, prototypes, descriptions and whatever it needs to be as specific as possible.

This is how the design board looks now:
Prioritized > doing > in review > done design > estimation > done.

At estimation, one developer takes lead on grooming the card (with help from other developers if needed).
That card is then split into tech-tasks with story points, that are put in the weekly sprint board. There we prioritize those tasks in and out of the sprint.
Then the dev teams do their thing (…really well, might I add).
I help with easy front-end things if I can (often I can’t, but I am the god-damn king of border colour).
Tasks get done and we push to production, with very high frequency, lately it has been at least once a day. That said, we usually over estimate every sprint. Bugs come in and we add them to the prioritization for the next sprint, unless they are super critical, then it’s all hands on deck.
Somewhere in the middle, we start this cycle all over on a new feat/story.

Design lead role

Right now I take a rather passive role. My excuse is that I am very much in production mode ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I also have an awesome CEO, who basically is strategically a really good designer. H really knows his stuff when it comes to design theories like value prop design, platform design, hooked model, jobs to be done, and so on. So he leads that direction quite well. I feel my time is better spent on working on the solutions to the questions, rather than on asking the right questions. At least for now.

— — Rant over — —

Are you still here? damn, you are a champ and deserve a reward. Here, have this tiny 🦍, it will bring bad karma to the next person who critiques your work without even trying to give you valuable feedback.

So now you are sitting there with a very valid stare and thinking; what was the point of all of this? I am a bit confused myself. Maybe for me to get some stuff off my chest, but it started as me trying to provide some context to the original question I had.

How does a small startup with one designer (with all that entails) organize a well-oiled process around design-driven and agile-driven product development? And what does that look like?

It would be very interesting to hear about others that are in the same situation and how their prosess is. If you for some reason feel the urge to share, that would be amazing.

Thanks you for reading 🙂

Only designer + Agile + startup = WAT? was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Only designer + Agile + startup = WAT?

Cool stuff, every week

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