Cross-functional product teams can be very confusing places to work, particularly as a Business Analyst.
You are expected to collaborate with customer experience, user experience and service design; whilst also being the primary point of contact for the agile development team, sometimes filling in as the Scrum Master too.
It’s demanding work for the Business Analyst, and that’s when everything is going well. Unfortunately, the situation is also ripe for dysfunction and the personal cost can be very high indeed.
Customer experience, user experience and service design are a confluence of new disciplines that weren’t around when agile first appeared, and this explains some of the difficulties we see in contemporary agile teams.
Agile product development that follows a UX centric approach can be tricky to get right, however, you can significantly improve your chances by following a few best practice guidelines.
These include:
- UX designers become the ‘voice of the customer’ and design entire, end-to-end user experiences.
- User research and focus group sessions, conducted periodically, inform the product roadmap.
- Wireframes and high-fidelity UX collateral become the defacto requirements developers work from.
- Your typical ‘as a, I want, so that’ user story no longer appears in the development backlog.
- The technical team assesses the feasibility of each design, including the required backend capabilities.
- Finished journeys are ‘cut up’ into frontend and backend stories and added to the backlog for development.
- Close coordination ensures backend development is ready for integration with frontend screens at the right time.
- Direct user feedback follows each new product launch, often infrequently, say every three to six months.
The presentation, High Fidelity Agile, explains a UX centric approach to agile product development in more detail, and you are welcome to use it in your own work.