Continuous planning for UX teams

Manage UX backlogs the Agile way

Photo by Niklas Bischop on Unsplash

If your UX team partners with an agile development team, you know that staying ahead of the curve is crucial (and avoiding mid-sprint fire drills and unpleasant curve balls even more).

A key element to delivering better results and minimizing disruptions is robust planning and organization of your backlog. After a turbulent semester with unexpected shifts in priorities, our partners decided to move from Semester Planning to Continuous Planning. Our UX team adapted to align with their cadence and continue providing inputs to our roadmaps.

Continuous Planning embeds better UX in the agile process software development operates on.

The shift from Semester to Continuous Planning

Semester Planning

Before we moved to continuous planning, our team worked at a semester cadence. We would meet with our partners to review plans, request UX dependencies, and negotiate our capacity to commit to the work. While this system allowed us to plan ahead, the challenge came with change. There were little touchpoints during our milestones (2-month sprints), making alignment hard and resulting in last-minute asks due to poor communication.

The goal of continuous planning is to reflect-prioritize-triage-plan on a consistent basis, to catch opportunities faster and in a less disruptive way.

Here’s how it worked:

• A few weeks before the semester: Meet with partners to review plans, goals, and business needs.
• Two weeks before the semester: Request UX dependencies and backlog tickets with detailed expectations. Product teams can file placeholders for distant dependencies.
• The week before the semester: Attend priority meetings to review dependencies and negotiate capacity, pushing items to different milestones (2-month sprints).
• Semester start: Begin work on committed dependencies, focusing on the first milestone and keeping the next in view.
• A week before Milestone 2: Ask partners to review and resubmit dependencies.