Scaling UX in Enterprise: Adapting Agile for a Lean UX Team

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I worked as part of a lean UX team for an organization that had not previously worked with UX before and needed an organized, structured way to handle project requests.

Highlights: Adapted Agile model to UX work for 2 designers and 1 researcher working in an organization with over 75 products.

Business Goal

Utilize limited UX bandwidth effectively across multiple projects

UX Process • Agile/Scrum

Adapting and Optimizing: From Ad Hoc to Structure

• Visibility of Requests: The spreadsheet allowed us to track upcoming projects, but with a large volume of requests, it made it difficult to ensure all stakeholders were aligned.

• Monthly Check-ins: Where the prioritization and negotiation took place, but shifting priorities made it difficult to track

Grooming

My team adopted Asana for project tracking. I moved all our existing work and upcoming projects to our new backlog while directing new requests to our intake form which funneled into our backlog automatically.

Benefit: Single source of truth on progress, completion, etc. for the UX team, Product teams, and Engineering teams.

Design Goal

• Improve capacity and roadmap management

• Enhance stakeholder collaboration and communication on priorities

• Establish a consistent process that easily adaptable to the organization

What worked

What could be improved

• Clarifying Ambiguity: Due to lack of experience working with UX, teams were unsure how to engage UX effectively

• Office Hours: Necessary space for informal conversations and small ad hoc requests

• Constant Shifting Priorities: Frequent scope changes and goal shifts made it hard to track projects and push them over the line

Initial state: Informal and Ad Hoc

I was the first UX designer the team had worked with. There was a learning curve for how and when to utilize UX. Most projects were ad hoc and informal with requests coming through slack messages. All was self-managed since I was the only designer and communicated via spreadsheet and through a single monthly meeting with the product manager, but as the team started to grow, it became necessary to formalize the intake process for better communication and prioritization.

2-Week Sprints

I had my team run on 2-week sprints, breaking up large projects into smaller milestones to fit into the 2-week timeframe. This helped us make better progress on projects and adjust as scope or priority changed.

Why informal requests didn't work:

• Lack of visibility meant lack of foresight on overlapping projects and collaboration opportunities

• Unclear goal tracking–Unclear whether we prioritizing the highest impact projects

My small UX team collaborated on this intake form to be used for all design and research requests. No matter the size of the project or level of detail, all requests started here.

Why the intake form worked:

• Easily referenced by all members of the team

• Documentation of project importance and goals

• Simple entry point for starting UX process

Intake Form

Formalizing the process: Forms, Sprints, and Syncs

Formalizing the intake and prioritization process was effective in managing ad hoc requests that took focus away from our main projects. By creating this process, it helped bring my UX team closer together. It helped us reduce the time it took to handle new requests and gave us space to help each other out. Productivity went up since project tracking became easier.

I presented our team's process to the larger UX organization and it sparked conversations about project tracking where teams faced similar struggles as mine. We helped inspire teams to try out similar processes and gave us insight into what other teams were doing to help us continue to improve our process.

Results and Impact

Backlog

Process Improvements

Pre-Sprint Planning

Before our sprint started, I met with the other designer and researcher to organize our backlog based on our understanding of team priorities and goals. We'd talk through project scope and details allowing us to see gaps or overlaps in other projects.

A day before our sprint started, we met with our Product Managers to discuss priority. We talked about projects each UX member was taking, asked for clarification on ambiguous projects, and negotiated priority shifts.

Leading the Conversation

I pitched the idea of using the Agile framework to my team and helped create the structure for our new process. I managed the team's intake and backlog while also facilitating each of the meetings. I helped drive conversations across the teams in our organization and helped negotiate projects with scope increase and priority shifts.

Office Hours

I started a weekly office hours to provide space for informal conversations. This space was used for small requests and consultative help for projects that didn't make it into our sprints. We socialized office hours by inviting stakeholders of ambiguous projects to help clarify UX needs.

Before using a form, product managers reached out to my small team individually.