Organizational Design for Teams, 1st Edition

Chapter 2. Making Organizational Shifts

In baseball, you don’t know nothing.

Yogi Berra

As we’ve worked with clients and taught Lean UX methods to teams, it’s become clear that it is also a 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.

Lean UX makes it possible for you to use the power of software to create a continuous improvement loop that allows your company to stay ahead of its competitors. It’s this loop that drives organizational agility and allows your company to react to changes in the market at speeds ...