Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

by Jeff Gothelf

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Lean UX favors collaboration and conversation over deliverables and rigid process. It engages the entire team to generate ideas from diverse points of view. It encourages the free and frequent exchange of ideas to allow the team to debate, decide, and move forward quickly. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Every business problem has endless solutions, and each member of a team will have an opinion on which is best. The challenge is figuring out which solution is most viable. Sometimes, it’s difficult or impossible to predict in advance which solution will work. By getting our ideas into the hands of customers (often through working software) sooner, the team can quickly assess solutions for market fit and viability. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Collaborating with your teammates and customers builds a shared understanding of the problem space and the proposed solutions. It creates consensus behind decisions. The result? Faster iterations, real involvement in product-making, and team investment in validated learning. It also lessens dependency on heavy documentation because everyone on the team has already participated in making the decisions. Collaboration creates alignment more effectively than written communication, argument, and elaborate defense. Responding to change over following a plan. The assumption in Lean UX is that the initial product designs will be wrong, so the team’s...