How to iterate faster with designers

Work with designers and use design thinking to iterate on user experience and give a clear direction to your development team.

Iterate or die

In biology, micro-organisms that can reproduce faster are also able to adapt faster. That is because each generation has the potential to develop some advantageous mutation. Products are very much the same, each version has the potential to adapt better to its environment and give you that edge over competition.

Iterating is at the center of the agile mindset. Being able to do short iterations on a product reduces risks and validates that you are building something of value. Even for established products iterating fast helps make sure you can adapt to the changes in your market.

Scrum advocates for sprints at the end of which a shippable increment is produced. These iterations can range from one week to a month. They are great because you have a product you can actually use at the end but they are also quite expensive because they involve a team of several developers.

Trial many ideas with designers

I have found that there is a cheaper and faster way to iterate. Design iterations. With the advent of products like InVision it is possible to create an interactive prototype in a matter of hours/days with only one designer involved.

Although these iterations do not produce something shippable, they allow you, as a product manager, to be uncompromising on usability and test many options. You can complete several cycles of iterations in one sprint on the most important part of your product: user experience. It is much easier for a designer to create a couple more screens and add transitions between them than it is for a developer to do the same on the actual product. These interactive prototypes can even be put in the hands of early adopters to get customer feedback.

Don’t forget to involve developers in vision workshops

Now that doesn’t mean you should not involve developers in this process. You need to be able to make decisions based on what’s possible. The sweet spot is at the intersection of business, design and feasibility. What works best is to have multi disciplinary workshops where designers, developers and product manager work together and share their different point of views on the product.

Beware not to fall in a tunnel and wait for every pixel of the design to be validated before starting development. Because things will inevitably change, once a cycle of design iterations is complete, you should go ahead and start developing your design. You can give clarity to the development team so they will be able to deliver faster and you will get a product you can ship.

These iterations are only complete if you finish with some customer feedback. Facilitating some testing lab after a couple iterations is the best way to validate that you are bringing value to customers.

At the end of the day, being able to iterate quickly on your product gives you an advantage over competition. With design iterations you can be uncompromising on quality and usability and make sure you are delivering value.