Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. Making Organizational Shifts

In baseball, you don’t know nothing.

Yogi Berra

In Part I of this book, we discussed the principles behind Lean UX. We hope you understand from that section that Lean UX is a mindset. In Part II, we discussed some of the key methods of Lean UX, because Lean UX is also a process. As we’ve worked with clients and taught these methods to teams, it’s become clear that Lean UX is also an operational and management method. For this reason, you’ll need to make some changes in your organization to get the most benefit from working this way.

Organizational shifts aren’t easy, but they’re not optional. The world has changed: our organizations must change with it. Any business of scale (or any business that seeks to scale) is, like it or not, in the software business. Regardless of the industry in which your company operates, software has become central to delivering your product or service.

This is both empowering and threatening. The ability to reach global markets, scale operations to meet increased demand, and create a continuous conversation with your customers has never been easier. This power is also a double-edged sword: it offers these same opportunities to smaller competitors who would never have been able to compete before the broad adoption of software. This makes the need to adopt Lean UX all the more urgent.

Many organizations have come to this conclusion and, in response, have sought to scale their product development teams. As they’ve ...