Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

by Jeff Gothelf

If you want your stakeholders — both those managing you and those dependent on you — to stay out of your way, make sure that they are aware of your plans. Here are a few tips: Maintain a “Problem Roadmap.” Instead of using a feature roadmap to communicate with stakeholders, transform the roadmap to communicate the problems you’ll be working on. Use this Problem Roadmap to drive planning and check-in meetings with stakeholders. Proactively reach out to your product owners and executives to keep them updated on your plans. Let them know: how the project is going; what you tried so far and learned; what you’ll be trying next; what risks you see in the product and how you plan to address them. Keep the conversations focused on outcomes (how you’re trending toward your goal) not feature sets. Ensure dependent departments (customer service, marketing, operations, etc.) are aware of upcoming changes that can affect their world. Provide them with plenty of time to update their workflows if necessary.