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I manage a team who develop a Web-based CRM. We are trying to introduce a UX Designer to this project, but I don't know the best approach to do that. I have two proposals, and I'm leaning more towards the 2nd one.

  1. In the first approach we have two product backlogs; the UX team will build all the mockups, studies and docs and deliver to the Dev Backlog. Only stories already mocked-up would be 'developable'. Then the product owner would prioritize the 1st and the 2nd backlogs. Not always the first task delivered by the 1st team would be developed first by the 2nd team.

  2. We had only one backlog and the UX designer would be part of team, I think this approach it's more 'lean' and brings the UX to the vision of the sprint, he becomes more engaged to the goal. But... would create a little waterfall by sprint, where the developers would need to wait him decides the best visual approach would be used to the new feature.

Scenarios

What strategy do you think works better? Do you have another proposal?

Thanks,

Armando

armandomiani
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  • This might be better suited for the [Project Management SE site](http://pm.stackexchange.com/). Option 2 is the better one - option 1 creates a "throw it over the wall" culture between the developers and the ux people. It would be better to have them work together on the tasks. – adrianbanks Oct 09 '13 at 00:09
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it should be on Software Engineering SE or Project Management SE instead. – Vadim Kotov Oct 27 '17 at 08:41
  • Stack Exchange team should create a feature for moving questions from site to site. Probably this question should be useful in another site. – armandomiani Oct 29 '17 at 01:16

2 Answers2

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As stated by Mike Cohn in The Benefits of Feature Team:

Rather than organizing around components, each team on a project can ideally be responsible for end-to-end delivery of working (tested) features.

Keeping this in mind, Scrum framework would recommend your 2nd approach. UX designer should be part of the team.

I personally think that even the first approach is not bad but more effort would be required from the separate teams to avoid failure due to communication breakdown. If the devs and UX designer start to work in their own silos and they think that end-to-end delivery is not a collective responsibility then this could lead to problems.

When UX designer is working in the same team along side developers then there will be a common vision between all team member of what is to be delivered during a particular sprint. If the devs face issues during design integration then the UX designer could quickly help out the devs because delivery goals of both of them will be same.

For the issue related to 'wait time' for developers, let the team decide about possible solutions (as Scrum encourages self-organizing teams). One possible option could be to start with the easiest screen which can quickly be mocked up and given to the developers. Another option could be that the developers can write unit tests (for Test Driven Development) while they are waiting for the designs.

Aziz Shaikh
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In my experience, UX designers are a difficult fit in Scrum Teams. The reason? They're too specialized.

Scrum refers to everyone on the Development Team as a Developer, irrespective of their specialization. We like people to be cross-skilled because that affords us greater agility.

In your situation, I would recommend a single Product Backlog because that way, you'll manage priority better. I then recommend that the UX guy share some of the UX work amongst the Development Team as well as take on some of the non-UX work (such as producing User Stories and/or testing)

Derek Davidson PST CST
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