Blog-Posts

For me, most of agile thinking derives from two fundamental realizations. First, we must be realistic about our inability to predict the future, and therefore shorten and strengthen feedback cycles. We strengthen feedback by putting working software in the hands of real people, and by test-driving the process of writing code at multiple scales. We shorten cycles by delivering smaller changes more often. We stop trying to be blindly and perfectly proactive, and instead reconceive large projects as a series of rapid, highly effective reactions. ...

Over the summer, I had a chance to participate in several short projects with balanced teams. These projects were in different product domains (entertainment, e-commerce, social media), on different platforms (iPad, iPhone, Web), with different sized teams (3-7), but all of them had the following aspects in common: The project was run within an agile framework (focus on the customer, continuous delivery, team sat together, lightweight documentation, team ownership of decisions, shared rituals like stand-ups, retrospectives, etc.) The team contained people with a mix of skills (front and back end development, user experience and information architecture, product management and marketing, graphic design, copywriting) The people on the team generally performed in their area of expertise/strength, but were supportive of other specialties and interested in learning new skills. All the projects were early stage “green fields” projects where we were simultaneously trying to discover how it would be used, how it would look and behave and how we could build it. My background is interaction design and product management, so I brought my toolkit of methods for problem definition, user research, modeling, storytelling, sketching and prototyping into the mix. Here are a few techniques that I found successful when working with balanced teams on projects like these. ...

As I was thinking about last week’s NYC edition of our Agile UX Retreats, and what made this particular retreat so significant, my thoughts went back to the IA Retreats at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, CA. Those retreats led to the creation of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, which later would be renamed the IA Institute. It was a small group of people with vision and drive creating something larger than themselves. ...