First 12 Months

Abstract

Organizations with low UX maturity require support in maturing their user experience strategy and implementation. Often, organizations do employ user experience experts; however, they are isolated from the main delivery effort and produce insights that are hard to incorporate into the products and features. What you’ll find in the first 12 months is that user experience as a concept has to become second nature to everyone’s’ thinking; otherwise you’ll end up with a microwave with too many buttons, a back office system that is annoying to use, a college curriculum that is outdated, or two pipes of one line that are supposed to meet yet are 2 feet apart when the welder tries to connect them. Business agility is being able to question the process itself rather than following blindly the prescriptive processes and procedures that were created by our predecessors.The prevalent mindset in organizations is: we need to be careful since the investment is big, and the impact is big, and we can’t be wrong; we mustn’t fail, therefore we need more data to decide, and then we’ll ask for more data just to be sure. Lean agile flips this mindset. Let’s run a small experiment where the stakes are small, the investment is small, the impact is small, and if we fail, we learn; therefore we don’t need too much data to decide.As lean agile coaches, we know better. We realize that small iterative delivery with real customer feedback provides better and faster results. In other words, if it takes an organization 13 months to release a feature while its competitor is able to figure out the first MVP in 2 months and then iterate on the MVP, releasing an MMF 2 months later and continuing to iterate until they have a considerable market share in 7 months, guess who will dominate the market. If time is of the essence, quick small releases that are validated with customers are a much better approach to creating value quickly.