DESIGN PROCESS

Our team, like may others in tech, followed the Agile development process and worked in 2-week design sprints. I recall the very first time I worked in an Agile process, years ago, and I struggled to understand how this could work for a design workflow. The daily standups, 2-week intervals and being lock-step with developer sprint schedules was something that I initially found difficult to fold into my creative process. However, as I began working with the process, it was clear that this approach would help us become more efficient and allow for iteration and testing. I’ve learned to embrace Agile methodology and have learned some best practices for how a Design team can work within the Agile sprint process.

One of the most important parts of the process is finding the correct cadence between Design and Development. Finding the right times to connect with developers and Product Managers within those 2-week sprints is also essential to the process. Ideally, Design should be at least 2 sprints ahead of the Developers. That way, we have adequate time to work on our designs, gather feedback from the developers, rework our designs, and complete handoff. The most important part of the process is regular check-ins and communication with Product Managers and Developers. We have scheduled review & check-in times, but also allow for the flexibility to have ad-hoc reviews as necessary to ensure we don’t go too far into a design before gathering developer input. The most successful design teams have collaborative relationships with developers, and an ease of communication between the two teams. If a designer is comfortable enough to pull a developer into a slack or in-person conversation as needed, rather than always waiting until a scheduled review, that goes a long way. Of course, it depends on the nature of the need, but there are times when a quick conversation is really beneficial.

It’s Supposed to be iterative!

The biggest advantage of the Agile process is that it allows for iteration. Quickly implement an idea, test it out, and adjust as needed. Not everything needs to be perfect for your first iteration. But you also need to be careful to not forget to come back and iterate. If you only create an “MVP” version and then never test or analyze metrics, you end up with everything in a “good enough” state when it could continue to be iterated on and become progressively better. It’s important to continue iterating and testing. You want to make sure that what you’ve designed is making a difference, but you also want to be able to adjust if it’s not doing what you had hoped. Beyond that, there a lot of ways to continue improving upon your initial idea, and to bring a certain amount of polish and delight to features that may be in MVP state. Those final finishing moments are really important to creating the best possible UX for your users. It’s something that is really important to designers, and as a leader, I need to advocate for the team to be able to make iterative improvements beyond initial functionality.