Four lessons we’ve learned by going lean

It’s no secret that Agile and Lean practices are nowadays considered to be the most efficient ways of delivering digital products and services. Both approaches seek to release successful products to the market quickly.

Lean UX is, simply put, a lean approach to designing digital products. It advocates learning about the customer and incorporating that knowledge into the product through a set of incremental and frequent changes, aka experiments.

If you are doing the following, you are already practicing it in some way:

• Designing in small batches (aka design sprints)
• Validating the solutions you are developing with customers
• Designing and building for a measurable business outcome

In some ways practicing Lean UX is just UX done well, especially for in-house design teams. However, agencies are facing unique challenges when trying to apply Lean UX practices.

Here are the main lessons we’ve learnt about Lean UX while working on several e-commerce projects for a retailer in Switzerland:

1. Start with one dedicated cross-functional team

There is no such thing as a one-woman show in design and development. Great teams build great digital products together. Having a small, co-located design team dedicated to one project at a time helps the team to stay focused, experiment, and resolve blockers fast. In the language of Lean project management: it eliminates the waste that communication across silos and departments creates.

If you are hiring an agency, ask them to give you a team that’s dedicated to your project from start to finish. Don’t just rely on client-agency relationship; instead make yourself part of the team. Whenever possible make sure that the team is co-located and cross-functional. You need designers, developers and business people working together at the same time. Each one bringing their own set of expertise to the project. If you are creating your own in-house team, do the same.

2. Communicate regularly

Communication between team members (including the client side team members) needs to be regular. This is crucial. Working lean(er) means decisions need to be made quickly. It’s easier to make decisions if the whole team meets on a regular basis and is aware of progress and priorities.

Daily face-to-face stand-ups work best. Use them to communicate progress by showing the work that’s been done, to resolve blockers and agree priorities.

If it’s proving to be difficult to organise face-to-face standups (as it was for us), you need to organise regular standups via a hangout or a video conference call.

3. Give your product owner authority

In every team a time will come when people will disagree. At that point you’ll need somebody to make the decision on how to move forward. If they need a consensus from several people who have not yet been involved in the project, this will slow everything down. Even a days delay in decision making during a sprint can set the team back and jeopardise delivery.

Choose one person who is able to make sound business decisions and keep the product vision. Give her the necessary authority to make decisions quickly.

4. Manage scope actively or sacrifice quality

In an ideal scenario there will be no fixed scope. Ideal scenarios are rare – so let’s be more realistic. According to the Project Management Institute, every project depends on three variables:

• Time (deadline)
• Cost (people and materials)
• Scope (functionality)

It’s simple; if you have two fixed variables (cost and time), the third one needs to be flexible. If all three are fixed, you have to compromise on quality–not a scenario you want to be in.

On our projects we were somewhere in between – scope was somewhat fixed around certain features but there were no set-in-stone requirements.

Here’s what worked for us and what you might want to try:

• Plan and communicate clearly the design work you are doing in every sprint and why
• Once you have made a list of most important things to solve, communicate in which order you will be solving them and why.
• Anticipate issues and talk openly about the impact they might have on the project.
• If a totally new idea gets introduced in the middle of a sprint, communicate the impact this will have on the team’s work.
• Revise your decisions and your sprint plan when needed. More work can rarely be added if something else doesn't get deprioritised. This might be clear to you but it might not be clear to everyone – you need to make it clear.

Bringing successful digital products to the market is hard work. A Lean UX approach can help you reduce the risks and make the process more efficient. But to do this, you’ll need a product owner with the authority to make quick decisions and one cross-functional team which communicates regularly and actively manages scope.

This will increase your chances at building a product your customers will love.