I have witness a trend from companies that don’t value the idea of a design sprint, sprints in general, and SCRUM. I recently saw Linkedin post making fun the design sprint devaluing its existence and purpose without considering why does it exist in the first place? While I do enjoy the occasional meme I don’t enjoy memes that misunderstand the process or misunderstanding people. Often we use memes to make fun of something or “group of people” and we devalue other people and other parts of the company to prioritize or reaffarim their own point of view over the others in the company. Everyone enjoy memes its not always a thing bad but it does say “something” without actually saying something.
I.E. we are making fun of designs sprints, because its getting in the way of what I want to do at work without understanding why? That process exist in the first place.
That reason is really simple, sprints and SCRUM.
TDLR sprints and the SCRUM framework are not exclusive tools of software developers they actually work very well in other contexts and industries i.e. design.
So why do design sprints matter? Why have designers on the team? Why you should hire UI/UX designers?
So often in software industry smaller companies forgo a design sprint or hiring UX/UI hire designers, because its not seen as a lean, however if you are developing software your only competitive advantage is going be functionality and Usability (UX).
Basically larger software companies and well funded start-ups hire UI/UX designers for this reason alone.
Companies like Benchling, SciNote, Labguru are not too different in there overall design but those small details like the UX are what really make the differences for customers.
Another example is Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, and Youtube. All these products have the same feature “Reels”, however Tik Tok sustain its competitive advantage through its UX designs. The UX for “Reels” feature is just better than Instagram Reels, its features supports faster editing verus the editing a video on Instagram Reels. Even though its the “same” feature by name, their UX is see different and Tik Tok has higher user retaintion rates for that difference.
That is why so many high profile companies and start-up designers have design sprints and UI/UX designers. Some of the best techanical leaders I have worked with understand that difference that functionallying making something work is not enough that usability is aspect to technology we cannot escape.
Smaller companies are prone to becoming feature factories and lose sight of their identity, and what does the product offer customers it’s UX is bad because they lost sight of what matters most the customers experience the quality of the product was not the same as it was or was never their in the first place.
Features customers love don’t receive updates, or are forgetten as to why they were designed in the first place.
Scability: More Problems, More Designs
So often when product has more customers, new customer demands for features, and etc We see the demand for new features, or improvements on existing features especially in the B2B space. I will exclude mobile apps like Tik Tok from this definitions because its so metrics drive by users clicks and likes. B2B applications do not always have this benefits, through business development and documenting use cases from sales, sales engineers, and product managers we see this increase of demand.
So software teams are driven by demand of new features and problems from customers. However every new features or new set of technologies comes new set of challenges not just techanical but actually desigining.
“What does this thing look like?”
“How does this thing work? and What is the results I should expect?”
When you are working in small teams, that answer to that question can look really different. For example
Sign Up, Login In, with user profile workflow: should not take long time to implement 1 week max.
Unless you have crazy upfront requirements like legal documentation, insurance details, and Financial details.
Role Based Access Contorl RBAC: this going take 3-6 weeks to design its becauses its feature that toggles other features on and off with many different user personas.
New way to use software no one has ever designed before.: I had to design the network map and its interactions its never been done before I could not look at past designs like sign up, profiles, tables, etc I compare that to many video game developers who try to build something competely out of genre or mix genres.
Designing something no one has ever done before is extremely diffcult and that requires many sprints to
- UX Research
- Test with users before coding
- Update//knowledge share designs with everyone
- Implement code & design again to step 1.
its very expensive and time consuming.
What is the take away? well some features like adding button can take a day its a individual task someone could do in a day/half-day. Well some features like RBAC can takes weeks to design so in sprint we break down the task and we roll over tasks created for Epic.
The design sprint is a great way to understand problems, design solutions, prototype and test solutions, and using Kanban board and SCRUM methods help manage the team’s workload.
Ok I can promise my counter-part, we do these design by end of sprint (3 weeks) and some minor designs in that sprint also. Sprints are a promise they will be done in that time.
Finally ownership
If I can assign people to Task in a sprint like Kanban board, with dailys its easier understand who’s responsbile for those tasks and use the board to follow those task.
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