Should a scrum team include user experience design professionals or should they be separate from the the scrum team? I’m often asked this question by UX designers and managers when their organization adopts scrum. Here is an email I received recently.

My company is making a transition from waterfall to agile development using the guidelines from your book The Elements of Scrum. In your coaching of various companies, I was wondering if you’ve worked with teams that have user experience designers (UX) and where they’ve fit into the process. As a manager, I wanted to get your thoughts on whether it makes more sense for individuals with these skills to be part of a scrum team as a team member or work with the product owner as a stakeholder.

Thanks,

K

Answer:

The short answer is, “It depends.” I’ve seen both approaches work: have the user experience people on the scrum team, or have the UX person be part of the product owner’s inner circle of advisors but not actually on the scrum team. Let’s look at each approach.

User Experience On The Scrum Team

If the UX people can do their work on each story effectively during the sprint, then it may work best to have them be part of the scrum team. In this case, the user stories tend to be focused on the business problem to be solved. The design, implementation, and testing of the solution happens during the sprint, including the UX work. This approach is common for incremental enhancement and maintenance of an existing product.

I’ve also seen this approach work at early stage start-ups, who are frequently pivoting their product. In this approach, the bigger picture of the user experience emerges over time, in much the same way that a system’s architecture is evolved over time using emergent architecture techniques. There is certainly some thinking, design, and work that happens early, but the bulk of this work happens incrementally over time, with frequent refactorings of the user interface.

User Experience As Stakeholder

In other situations, the user experience people work closely with the product owner and team, but are not part of the scrum team. The usual pattern here is that the UX artifacts are part of the user stories. In this way, a user story will have an overview “As a (type of user), I want (something), so that (some value is created).” The story will also include acceptance criteria, and UX documentation such as wire frames or mockups. Of course, documentation is not sufficient to enable the team to truly understand the desired result, so the UX person will have many conversations with the team members to help them understand what is desired, and to negotiate with the team regarding the inevitable trade-offs that will need to be made. Additionally, good UX people will take the working software that the team is creating and field test it with actual users to see if the user experience is working as desired.

Thus, the UX person is doing work ahead of the sprint, creating designs, wireframes, and mock-ups. The UX person is also working with the team during the sprint to ensure the team is building software that embodies the desired user experience. And finally, the UX person is doing work after the sprint to validate the usability of the software that has been created.

Taking this model a step further, I have seen UX people who have become their team’s product owner. This can work really well, as a good UX person truly understands the users, what they are trying to accomplish, and what they value.

Cheers,

Chris