Why Designers still struggle with Agile in 2025(And How to Fix It)

SCRUM says: “Work in two-week sprints.”
Designers say: “But research takes three weeks.”

SCRUM says: “Ship fast, iterate later.”
Designers say: “But bad UX doesn’t get a second chance, devs say we should get them the final design.”

SCRUM says: “Developers need final designs by Friday.”
Designers say: “The business team just changed all the requirements on Thursday after we showed them prototypes on Wednesday.”

And that’s how that goes for a fair amount of product teams. Why is that so?

💡 Agile is great for many things.
💡 But design work is hardly predictable although we all want to live in denial of this fact.
💡 It often feel like a mess that a cat makes playing with yarn — you have no idea how many loops you actually made, you pulled your process, stretched it, made it even more complicated and somehow you arrive to a solution that makes a perfect sense and the whole team agrees on it, though it has nothing to do with Double Diamond.

The fix?

👉 Provide designers with user stories that enable them to discover why, what and when the user wants to do something, not HOW the user acts. They are the experts in humans in the team, let them figure out the human part. Remember, a lot of problems can be solved with psychology way faster than with technology.

👉 Lift the expectations of splitting design into smaller chunks that fit the sprint plan. I had design teams working with epics and we were all fine — designers had at times 2, at times 6 weeks to go through as many back and forth loops as needed, and the dev team was fully busy with other things — and pulled in when designers needed them. And this did improve the efficiency of a) design team, b) our meetings A LOT.

👉 Run exploration sprints (Sprint 0). Or many sprints 0. BUT in my experience that only works ( ‼️ ) if the team focuses on the whole experience on a very high level and you already know the scope of the exploration. That allows the team to discover their next exploration areas and avoid drifting away with blue sky thinking.

👉 Use dual-track Agile. (One track for discovery, one for delivery.) Don’t try to match the amount of work in UX and dev sprints. It is absolutely ok that designers need 3 sprints to design what developers will implement for 1 sprint and vice versa.

👉 Treat UX debt like tech debt. (Fixing it later is always more expensive.) Here I advice to still take designers POV not as set in stone, but rather like a conversation starter.

Especially junior designers are bombarded now with online content about design systems and can fall into the loophole of trying to make the system more cohesive and more compartmentalised needlessly as they lack the perspective on what is the threshold up to which more seemless design system actually streamlines everybodys work. I saw a lot of designers simply overdoing that as they were not provided enought of business and product development context, so I would not say it’s designers fault, but rather a communication error.

To sum up, my point is — we all tried cramming human-centered design into code-centered workflows. In many companies for over 10 years now. The only thing we consistently ship fast with that approach is frustration.

Try my hacks above to work more flexibly with Agile and let me know how it worked in the comments below.

Also, please do share, what’s your best hack to navigate a design team through an Agile environment?