Keeping Agile Design on Track
Design iteration is great if there’s a product vision to pin the flag to.
Without a vision the product being built could end up with a mess of confused and often contradictory design patterns, interactions and experiences. It might not sound particularly ‘Agile’ to do design work up front, however creating a tangible product goal can allow the design and development team to keep on track and focus decisions while continually iterating towards that goal.
Benefits to the team and business
Creating a product vision can focus discussions and will bring value to both the design and development team and any business stakeholders involved.
Agile development teams
- All visual and experience design decisions can be aligned to the future vision, ensuring consistency across features and designers.
- Creates space and time for the team to explore, experiment and test options with customers while business stakeholders can appease the leadership with a showcase of future work.
- Allows the team to determine real customer needs while stakeholders are happy the team is focused on an end goal.
- Gives the team a focus for discussions and collaborative cross-disciplinary decision making while they iterate towards the goal.
- Allows developers to feedback on a holistic design and highlight any potential future technical constraints.
- Allows developers to create a technical strategy for the future development of the product.
- Allows designers to flex their creative visual and experience design muscles while bypassing real world constraints.
- Designers can identify and catalogue new design patterns or elements for future iteration.
Business stakeholders
- Great business leaders can use a product vision to whip up interest internally and also motivate a team around a single goal.
- They can help to remove any larger obstacles or distractions upfront.
- Satisfies the need to showcase products and design work to leadership and financial teams to obtain people, time and money for the project.
- They can provide direction and it allows them to feel involved with the design decisions and have their input upfront.
- They can put the team in contact with any other internal technical or product teams early and influence the right people across the business to provide help if required.
- Opens up the discussion on external market influences and future product or business strategy.
Risks to consider
When framed by the principles of the Agile manifesto it’s clear that there are some risks to bear in mind when creating a product vision. If not mitigated successfully then the use of a vision may automatically force the team into a waterfall process of big upfront design and a big bang release.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Be careful with how far the product vision goes, use it as a tool rather than project documentation.
- Keep the focus to couple of product areas/features/interactions, don’t go overboard and design the whole product — keep it simple and maximise the amount of work not done.
- The product vision should be kept to a high level and other design tools like pattern libraries and style guides used for specific interactions.
Working software is the primary measure of progress
- Design is a process of understanding not an output and it’s worth remembering the product vision is purely an artefact and not a sign of product progress.
- Ensure the process of ‘build, measure, learn’ is adhered to and use a Lean approach of building minimum viable products to experiment with.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Use the product vision to aid interactions with the team, it’s a tool to aid collaboration and product focus.
- Have the product vision printed out in a prominent place, this will allow the team to gather around and discuss.
Responding to change over following a plan
- Ensure that everyone on the team is aware that the product vision is something to aim for and not the scope of what has to be delivered.
- Changes to the product can and will happen based on real life feedback and that still has to be compelling for the business to be happy pivoting away from the original vision.
Business people and the design and development team must work together throughout the project
- Be careful not to allow business stakeholders to dictate the progress of a product upfront, it still needs to provide for customer needs or problems.
- Business stakeholders can’t just be part of the initial product vision and walk away until the the project is complete.
- Equally they should be be involved in discovery and experimentation with customers to understand the value their product can bring.
- Changes to the product vision will inevitably happen whether that’s due to customer feedback or technical challenges and with business stakeholders close by these decisions can be made quickly.
Designers need to understand the value they can bring to an Agile development team, iteration is great if there’s a product vision to pin the flag to and designers are crucial to that.
If there is no end goal in sight the product will end up with a mess of confused and contradictory design patterns and experiences, and for me the benefits of creating an upfront product vision outweigh the risks.
I’m a Product Enablement & Ops Consultant with over a decade working in technology organisations, enabling product leadership to maximise their performance and impact.
Visit chriscompston.com to find out more.
