Agile 2

8Product Design and Agile 2

There are a great many ideas and practices in the community of product design, worthy of many books. This chapter is not about product design. This chapter is about Agile 2 ideas that might help in defining one's approach to product design and how product vision, design, and implementation might best link together, from an Agile 2 perspective.

Agile Ignored Design from the Beginning

In a January 2020 talk,¹ John Schrag, Autodesk's director of experience design, talks about his experience working under Lynn Miller (mentioned later in this chapter) at Alias during the 1990s. He explains that they had an effective design process that was well integrated with development, but then in 2001 the Agile Manifesto was published. Alias brought Jim Highsmith in to Alias to train developers. This revolutionized their software practice, but Agile had no mention of user experience (UX), and the design team suddenly were “at ends,” as Schrag put it. He went on to say the following:

“We would do a usability study, but by the time we were done, development would be three phases off; or we'd be designing something and they'd have changed direction in one of their Agile sprints: we couldn't give them feedback when they needed it, and we kind of got disconnected. It was horrible. And the funny thing is we were going to other design conferences and seeing the same problem among other people … .”

Early Agile basically instructed developers to collaborate with customers, ...