“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an idiom that could greatly benefit product development teams if its principles were applied their daily work. Too often our own cognitive biases allow us to believe that the vision is ready to be turned into a story when we can’t think of any more questions to ask. While every member has agreed on the objective, the differences in the envisioned solution don’t surface until the sprint has already started. After running into so many of these situations, I have become adept at ensuring team alignment. Here are some easy ways I have been able to help mitigate risks of terminating sprints.
Ask Better Questions
Human beings are natural problem solvers. It is in our nature to seek solutions, sometimes as a detriment to our own interests. When a product team rushes into a solution, the team stops focusing on the objective which often contains underlying purposes which may not have yet been realized. In my experience, it has been a highly constructive exercise for someone on the team to take on a detective-like role, and facilitate interviews with everyone who touches the product. Asking a dev manager a question like “What do you think the client wants?” or asking the client “What is your vision for this product?” can lead to a normalization in the team mission and a tighter bond.
Empathy is not a UX skill, it is a human skill. Like many skills, it gets better with practice. Frequent promotions of empathetic questions will lead to a team full of people with rounded skill sets.
Be The Logical Checkpoint
Despite the bad reputation it can earn, being the person who questions everything can end up helping the product by getting the team to truly evaluate the value of a story. Taking on this role requires some people skills, and does at times reduce the momentum a team can have. However, by creating a habit with-in the team to be the logical check-point, and demonstrating that it’s a simple skill that can be performed by anyone, this behavior will soon become a regular part of the team’s product creation process.
Mini-Visions & Mini-Strategies
Simply put, the further we look into the future, the less we see. This ambiguity in the vision makes it harder to plan for, which makes it harder to win the approval of IT workers who tend to favor the tangible. While the Product Vision exists as a North star, every epic and story needs to help get the product closer to that. As obvious as this sounds, it is very easy for teams to lose sight of this objective when the focus is on the tactics & execution. It is in these very moments where designers have the opportunity to bridge the gaps with scaled vision proposals. A designer who can illustrate the connection between the Product Vision and an epic for the up-coming quarter is naturally in a better position to steer the small efforts into the right direction.