When working for design agency Tobias, I led the UX team tasked with transforming a financial institution’s customer experience. We knew that part of that process would be designing and building new digital experiences for their customers and staff. Our UX designers consistently over delivered, both in terms of volume and quality. To make sure the experiences we were designing were sustainable, I created agile and sprint based processes. This not only supported my team to do great work, but set up the conditions for full ownership by the client, supported by training courses to build their design maturity and capabilities.

I led a hybrid team consisting of two of our best UX designers and two subject matter experts from the client’s organisation. Working with their senior technical BA, I co-designed a product roadmap, defining the epics required to realise their strategy, and the backlog items for each epic. I then designed their first ever agile sprint process, writing a sprint manual customised for their unique culture, and set up the hybrid team and sprint rituals that would be required. I ran this process for the first few months, fine tuning it though our fortnightly sprint retros.

We trained the client members of our team to run design sprints, with the goal that the client would eventually use their own designers to replace ours. In addition to building a process that could be transferred, the design work itself was based on reapetable and documented design patterns (including documented components in a shared Figma library). This was packaged in such a way that it could be picked up by a future internal design capacity.

Product

‍Agile processes are excellent for product design. They allow us to respond quickly as business needs change and as we learn more about our product and its users. This approach also allowed us to pragmatically respond to design and technical efforts that were more complicated than anticipated or that tested poorly with users. In addition, this process built confidence in our stakeholders as they saw progess in the demos for each sprint. This ritual created a more authentic understanding of the design and build process, which in turn gave our stakeholders the understanding they needed to make better business and design decisions.

People

‍Key to any agile process is creating conditions where the sprint team can do their best work. This way of working can put a lot of pressure on a team, but also allows us to respond quickly to what we learnt during the sprints, allowing us to adjust our process to optimise the performance of each team member. For example, our UX designers struggled to estimate on the fly, so splitting the sprint estimation session into an initial session where we reviewed and assigned backlog items, breaking off to do individual estimations, then coming back together to lock in our estimates, led to better estimations and a happier and more productive team.

This was our client’s first experience of an agile design process. With the support of the greater Tobias team, they successfully took ownership of the process. Once the process was established, we moved from the Miro boards we had used to get us up and running quickly, to a more traditional sprint management system (in this case using Microsoft Devops).

I handed the product owner role to the client side technical BA who we trained in our methods. The organisation has since taken on its own designers to continue our formative work, continuing with the product based process I designed for them.