Agile delivery teams work in sprints with cross-functional teams to create small iterative or incremental improvements to a product.

UX designers prefer to work on the big picture alongside other designers

The trick is finding the balance between these 2 ways of working. UX designers on an agile delivery team need to be in several places at once while maintaining laser focus on the task at hand.

At Envato, we adapted a typical agile UX process to enable our UX designers to get this balance just right. Below I’ll explain how we started, the problems we encountered, and how we found the right balance with 3 modes of working.

Starting off with agile UX

We embed our UX designers within cross-functional feature teams made up of about 8 people, including a product manager and front- and back-end developers.

Each team specializes in a single part of our product—either a specific feature like our author upload tool, or a single customer journey such as the purchase process.

“Involve the whole team—including developers—in brainstorming ideas for the work ahead.”

Every sprint (a repeatable 2-week process), the team ships a new iteration to the customer and measures the results.

It’s not easy to wedge the UX process—research, ideation, prototyping, user testing, and iteration—into a 2-week timeframe. So an agile UX designer typically works at least one sprint ahead of their team to ensure they can have designs ready for the developers and avoid becoming a blocker for the team.

The problem with working one sprint ahead

We discovered that working too far ahead created an environment of “us and them” where the developers wanted designs delivered in a finished state, and UX designers felt pressured to keep delivering. It felt like design’s only purpose was to feed the development team with designs.

We spent most of the sprint fighting the little fires that occur when design and development aren’t aligned. Designers were more focused on trying to make the design work within the constraints that emerge during development. So the strategic work of defining the product of the future or the research into the customer’s needs rarely happened.

“Design’s only purpose should not be feeding the dev team with designs.”

We wanted to be measured by successful software in the hands of our customer—and not on the successful delivery of designs to the developers. So we made the switch to working half a sprint ahead.

This meant we needed to adjust the way we worked to fit 3 different modes of work. From collaborating with the developers and sharing their goal for the sprint, to working with the product manager on preparing just enough for the sprints ahead. We also made customer research an ongoing process and ensured we gave time for investigating the future product direction.

Working closely with front-end developers at Envato.

1. The current sprint

Our biggest priority: working with our team to focus on delivering the goal of that sprint. We need to make sure the developers have everything they need. As we gain knowledge during the sprint, we respond to the changes and compromises that need to be made. We find ourselves:

Doing just enough design—sketching and talking more than wireframing and creating mockups

Creating small iterations of the feature, not the full picture

Guerrilla user testing

Collaborating with front-end developers

Working with other designers to ensure a cohesive experience

Leaping in to help when problems pop up

Sketching flows and screens on a whiteboard.

2. Future sprints

UX takes longer than the 2 weeks you have for each sprint once you’ve considered the research, idea generation, testing, and feedback. So we need to be ready for the sprints ahead. Balancing preparing for the iterations ahead against not doing too much in advance or without the collaboration of the development team.

In our second mode, we focus on discovering what the right thing to build is so we can build it right. This includes:

Researching customer needs and pain points

Running an idea workshop—we like the Design Studio format

Sketching flows and screens

Building and testing prototypes with InVision

Gathering feedback from everyone, including the customer

Measuring outcomes from previous sprints to form new hypotheses

Discussing opportunities in the customer journey.

3. The roadmap

A product roadmap gives you a bird’s-eye view of where your product is going. And in order for the modes above to work, a product roadmap is key.

To create the roadmap, we collaborate with product managers. This is where we do most of our research. The teams are split between different customer types. Building a detailed picture of your customer is vital for creating a successful roadmap. We work on:

Jobs-to-be-done customer interviews

Service Design to map out the entire customer journey

Running workshops to gain a shared understanding of the future

Creating high-level concepts, a 10,000-foot view of the product in the future

Gathering feedback from business stakeholders

Collaborating with other designers.

Design facilitation

We rarely sit at our desks. Design facilitation is our new role. We collaborate in the open to facilitate the design of the product. The results can only be realized once the design is part of the product and in the hands of the customer—we can’t do this alone.

“Design facilitation is our new role.”

So in addition to these 3 modes, we need to be great with people. We build really strong relationships and collaborate closely with several different people. We build empathy with them and their world to understand their goals and constraints. People like:

Developers

Business stakeholders

Other designers and researchers

The end user of the product

Organizing the work in-hand.

Making it work

All this seems very hard, and it is. The secret to making agile UX work: always know the most valuable thing you can do. We give each task 100%—as multi-tasking is not allowed. But we never forget to make time for the other work.

If you don’t develop a roadmap, your product won’t move forward. Without preparing for the work ahead, the whole team will slow down. And without working closely with developers those results won’t get realized.

“If you don’t develop a roadmap, your product won’t move forward.”

Things to try with your team

Embed your designers into each development team

Experiment with reducing the number of sprints ahead that your designers work

Show design work on the same wall you use to show work-in-progress development work

Map out the whole customer journey with the whole team

Involve the whole team—including developers—in brainstorming ideas for the work ahead

Create an ongoing research process and involve the whole team

Visualize all your design tasks for everyone to see

Nothing’s ever perfect. Every piece of design work is an iteration towards perfection and the search for more knowledge about the customer and their needs.

To be successful and happy working like this—as the UX designer in a fast-moving cross-functional team—you could say you need to be superhuman. But I think it’s more about being a super human being.