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Design is not the frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer cake. A Q&A with USAA's Erin Hauber
Note: the presentation is way more interesting than the Q&A. The Q&A part is not really interesting at all. I just wrote down one interesting question/answer.
Intro
The Scaled Agile Framework (often referred to as SAFe by both friends and enemies) tries hard to ignore UX design. Even the most recent versions only give lip service to Lean UX and Customer Centricity. When organizations announce their adoption of this framework, it can feel like a big step backward for any UX leaders trying to integrate design into their Agile development processes.
Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Erin Hauber, Director of Human-Centered Design Practice at USAA, has unlocked some of the secrets to integrating UX design directly into a SAFe approach. If she can do this with SAFe, you can do it with any Agile-based organization.
Watch Erin’s 21-minute presentation here below on how she’s successfully integrated UX design into SAFe, then go to the Q&A.
Q&A
What is “Bring Your Own Epic”?
It’s a modified design sprint. It’s 3 and a half days where we gather an extended cross functional team within the SAFe framework. We walk them through and they do UCD activities like journey mappings, value statements. So they build new collaboration, intentions and habits as a value oriented team. It’s a way to makes sure that the people building the experience are as aware as possible of why we’re doing the things we’re doing. It starts by asking everybody what they thing the project is about and what its value use. This usually uncovers a great deal of misalignment.
Key stakeholder are brought in towards the end, when the team does the LPM playback, a replay of what is now the shared understanding of the process, so (s)he can weigh in and also be challenged.
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