Video Link: https://jeffgothelf.com/work-with-me/
Which process is the best: Lean, Agile or Design Thinking?
- Smaller companies have limited number of sources, so it is important to deliver features quickly and receive feedbacks.
- Larger companies have more resources, but they also have different methodologies. Just because one design process worked for them in the past, it does not mean it will be appropriate for the future.
- But how do we combine these design processes?
What does Agile mean?
- Agile means focusing on learning and discovering from trial and error over following a set of plans.
What does Lean mean?
- Lean means instead of creating features and hope the market will accept it, observe the market and only produce the feature that is needed by the market.
- Sprints are another component of lean UX that allow the designers to reflect quickly.
- Lean startup focuses on the question “should we build it?”
What does Design Thinking mean?
- The process of empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.
What to do now?
- instead of combining the design process, combine the design principles
10 Design Principles to Consider
Customer value = Business value
Understand the market change and customer’s needs. The outcome of the product shows whether the product meets the customer’s needs and changes how the product should shift overtime.
Example: Gibson guitar vs. Fender Guitar
Work in short cycles
Make evidence-based decisions. As more evidence is collect about the product design, its development changes.
What is the most important thing to learn in this stage?
What is the least amount of work we need to do to learn it?
— Jeff Gothelf
Holding regular retrospectives
Improve the product. At the end of each design cycle, reflect on what worked with the product and what did not.
Go and see
Managing by walking around. See how the team is functioning, what is working, what is not. Find the good design patterns that work for the team regardless of what design process it is.
Test high risk hypotheses
Hypothesis: we believe [outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully [attain this user benefit] with [this solution/feature].
Assess the design risk, market risk, system risk, technical risk. Use hypotheses to test the ones that are high risk and low understanding.
Do less, more frequent
What is the fastest way to learn the most important thing?
Example: Ford fake a self driving car.
Work as a balanced team
Build a small, dedicated, cross-functional team to build a solution.
Radical transparency
Stand ups, demos, proactive emails, access to customers…The team decides the minimum and the customer decides viability. Give the team access to analytics.
Review Incentives and performance management
What is your job? vs What are you asked to do?
Fixed time/scope vs Design process
Make learning first priority
Put all the work on one backlog.
