Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Preface

The biggest lie in software is still phase two.

If you’ve spent any time building digital products in the past 30 years—regardless of your role—you’ve felt the sting of this lie. And if your team claims to be agile, is phase two still a valid concept? Teams prioritize features and ideas for each sprint, racing toward a launch date while pushing nonprioritized ideas to the next phase of work. Except that phase never comes, and those features are gone—never to be heard from again. As designers, product managers, coaches, and consultants, we’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of wireframes, product backlog items, and workflows end up in this same bucket.

But were these ideas abandoned because they were flawed? Because something changed in the market? Did the features that shipped actually meet customer and business goals? Or did the team simply forget? They never got to phase two.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries lays out his vision for how to ensure the ideas that have the most value get the most resources. The method Ries promotes relies on experimentation, rapid iterations of ideas, and evolutionary processes. In a truly agile environment, teams launch features continuously, making the actual deployment of code a nonevent. The entire concept of phase two has become moot.

The junction of Lean Startup and user experience (UX) design—and their symbiotically beneficial coexistence—is Lean UX.

What Is Lean UX?

The Lean principles underlying Lean Startup apply to Lean UX in three ...