More and more agile teams began to value good design, to the extend to actually hire in-house designers to be part of the team. However there is often an unspoken tension between the product manager and the designer: who get to define the user experience? An agile product manager is thinking in terms of user stories, which doesn't always align with the design specs. Vice versa. It eventually boils down to: How can design practices become an integral part of an agile team? Between PM and Design, there may be many disagreements on features and priority. But let's start with a common ground: solving the user pain. Eventually I stopped writing design specs, but to help the PM write better user stories. In this session I'd like to share practical lessons on Design/PM collaboration to bring the best out of both.
About Shanfan Huang
Drawing. Coding. Learning. Making. Exploring. Dancing. bio from Twitter
Shanfan Huang is a product designer at Pivotal Labs, an agile development consultancy that helps the clients transform their way of building software. She aspires to bring Lean UX practice into agile development teams.
26. Design has long been a waterfall practice,
not suited for pivoting course;
Agile is invented to combat the
uncertainty and change.
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/mcdp1.pdf
32. Things to Try:
First, REALLY think like a user.
Then, acknowledge the project
limitation.
33. Closing thoughts:
Forget about the design specs, collaborate in real-time
PMs can help Designers to ground down to
the execution
Use the (intent - task) user stories to
steer the implementation
Designers can help PMs to visualize the
big picture
Use the living persona and user
scenarios to guide the overall
product direction