User experience professionals devote our careers to the end user. We interview them, we survey them, invite them to participate in formal in-lab usability studies, informal guerrilla testing in the wild, and the occasional focus groups. We design wireframes and prototypes. We pride ourselves on our expert domain knowledge of the “users.” We craft in-depth personas based on the qualitative and quantitative data we collect. Our eyes gleam with pride when people begin using our artifacts in their daily lives. But what happens when we stop looking at “users” as only those individuals who use our products as the “end user” and begin to redefine and expand the role of the user? This case-study chronicles my experience with a scrum team, calling on the skills above to influence and help lead a scrum team to success. I participated in all of their ceremonies: daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Through this immersion, I was able to identify their user needs. They needed a leader. There was a communication disconnect between the team and their internal stakeholders. And they needed help with the backlog. I will share how we were able to develop new communication strategies to bridge the gap with stakeholders, giving the developers clearer understanding of what the stakeholders’ needs were. We were also able to develop new methodologies using Jeffrey Davidson’s story writing technique to better understand the scope of our backlogs. The result? The developers were able to become a high-functioning empowered team who was able to complete their work and meet their goals!

1. Using UX Skills to Influence a Scrum Team.
An Agile UX Case Study
Tonya McCarley • July 28, 2016
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2. Agenda
§ Brief UX overview
§ Scope of the PROJECT
§ Impact of Professional Development
§ IDEA of Slicing
§ Implementation & Measurement
§ What was Learned
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5. Continual Learning
§ Observation of our users
§ Looking for patterns to make the system and/or task easier
for users to be more successful
§ Proposing new solutions
§ Iterating to make improvements
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7. The Scope
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8. The UX Assignment
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12. What is the problem?

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14. Getting Started
§ Break down the Backlog
- Focus on small verticals
§ Prioritize on the System Workflow
- Establish the core baseline
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15. Content
Tree
Ingest
Content
Publish
Content
Track
Content
Find
Content

16. Slice 1
§ Introduced the high-level stories from the Backlog
§ Gave the team independence to organize
- Focus on 1 slice = 1 sprint
§ GO!
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17. Slice 1 Retro
Complaints
§ Stepping on each other in the code
§ Not enough new work
§ QA bogged down, “log jam” built up
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20. Slice 2
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21. Slice 2 – Retro
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22. Slice 2 – Retro (continued)
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23. Keep slicing
§ Limit the WIP to green dots
- Tie the green dots to VALUE stories
§ If the developers were out of work:
- PAIR with a fellow developer
- Assist QA with getting stories completed
- Take a break
§ Overall increased level of communication
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24. Slice 3 – Hiccup…
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25. Slice 3 – But Look
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26. Well-oiled machine
§ We’re not flooding QA
§ More conversations are happening in the space
§ More paired programming
§ Less mistakes, fewer re-opens
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27. Keep slicing & Retroing
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30. Culture change
A culture of wins
§ Demos
§ Learnings
§ We rally when we hit a snag
And we celebrate
§ Off-site lunches
§ Cupcakes
§ Healthier snacks
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31. What we learned
Slicing works!
§ Faster to demos & working software
§ Faster to fail & course correct
- Increased collaboration
- Paired programming
§ Better communication
§ Happier stakeholders
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32. Huge workflow and
no one knew how to
get through it
Try a new process
Iterated based on learnings
from retrospective

33. Questions?
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35. Contact
Tonya McCarley
mccato@gmail.com
@tmccarley
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