However, many design teams are left to work by themselves. They are simply following a brief, and not able to contribute to a great user experience, as the team is not aligned with its incentives.
Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden got inspired by the Lean Startup approach, initially introduced by Eric Ries for growing businesses. Both writers define Lean UX as an approach to cutting waste and inefficiency, while at the same time allowing teams to be flexible, creative, but most importantly customer-focused.
Let’s dive into some of the key elements of Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams!
In the Lean Startup book, Eric Ries showcased an approach where businesses evaluate if the user problems and pains solved by the product are relevant, find the right product-market fit, and use the most relevant marketing channels,
Gothelf & Seider applied this concept to user experience, by prioritising as the core values of your workforce a mix between design thinking, agile software development and lean startup.
In short, both tech entrepreneurs focus on iterating problems and solving them faster, and creating value specifically for the user.
- First, every team should think about design. With that in mind, brainstorming with the company as a whole to discover and solve problems becomes much easier. It is just like a designer would solve a design problem himself
- Second, implementing agile software development, in which every team is invited to a workshop, is mandatory. It cuts the development process into cycles and helps all the teams align according to sprints & deadlines.
- The last step is to implement a Lean Startup approach to the product design, making experimentations much faster to get feedback on, and allowing faster product delivery, aligned with the customers’ needs. After that, it’s easy to scrape the little issues off and let your best ideas flow better
The concept of Lean UX is to bring product design to the forefront, as it delivers the correct user experience by quickly defining hypotheses on what your user would feel like, and validating it across all the different teams. With this approach, product design is way more aligned with the product, and the product’s UX becomes substantially relevant to what your product is there for.
A key idea of the book? Test your best users as regularly as possible, and point out with your team what to improve or change, following the Agile process. This way you’ll be able to make the proper refinements faster, and stay ahead of the curve!
Following the book’s first fundamental principle, receiving briefs from leadership shouldn’t compel teams to work in their respective silo. Each workshop and brainstorming session adds a new point of view of an evolving customer base and allows teams to pinpoint what to improve or solve way faster.
Bring your teams together, and harmonise them with the sole mindset of focusing on your customer. If you’re looking to level up your practices and shape products that leverage customer value by solving the right problems, I couldn’t recommend this book enough. In the end, the Lean UX method is a mindset your team needs to be aligned to, more than a simple approach to product.
