UX planning in an agile world
It’s the end of the day. You’re wondering where the time went. You didn’t get to your list of things to do and you feel unproductive despite your full day of meetings.
As UX designers, we want to build confidence in what we build. We run activities like research, testing, data analysis, collaborations, prototyping, mapping, and facilitating. However, we often have very little time to do everything we want. We compromise our process because we need to get it all done now.
Over the years, I’ve used a simple calendar system to help manage the workload. It’s a quarterly calendar where either I, or a team of designers and researchers, will plan what we need to get done to achieve the quarterly’s OKRs. It is used to expose time and effort needed for our UX activities, and to prioritise what’s coming up.
Here’s a breakdown of how it looks:
1. Understand upcoming product goals + key milestones
To start, have a conversation with your Product Manager and team. Understand what targets or goals you have coming up, and what major milestones or deadlines the team has to achieve.
Mark them out on your calendar so you always have a clear reference.
Include in any holidays or any UX colleague on leave so you can get an overall view of people’s availability as well.
2. Plan the UX activities to achieve those goals
Next, work backwards from your goals and milestones. Consider what you need to do to have more confidence with what you contribute to the work.
Do you need to run exploratory research to find out X? Do you need to set up workshops to get alignment with your team and stakeholders before the milestone? Do you need to set time aside to collaborate with your team?
As you start listing everything you need to do, you will find out that sometimes there is a lot to be done. Thus, you can adjust how you run an activity to achieve the same outcome based on the time and capacity you have. Or, you can have another conversation with your Product Manager to prioritise activities or shift milestones if more time is needed to build confidence in your learnings.
There can be lots of back and forth and changes along the way. Just make sure you keep your team updated on what you’re planning.
If you have to plan and organise these activities alone, always include that in your calendar. As things like recruiting for research or planning for workshops can take some time. You don’t have to put in every single meeting or task, just the main activities for the week.
Planning here doesn’t indicate what you’re building but the activities needed to build your product/service well. Hence it works in a lean and agile world. You plan enough in advance to give yourself time and space to do something well. At the same time, you can easily adjust this timeline. For example, through your research, you find that something is not worth exploring. You can discuss this with your team and figure out how to pivot and adjust your milestones and activities from there.
Conclusion
This calendar system is not about what deliverables you will have but the key activities you will do to achieve the product and team goals. Whether you work in an agile/lean/scrum environment, it’s an effective way to surface the UX capacity of the team, take control over your own workload and also help the team prioritise better.
