We were able to use the start of the post-MVP phase to address and improve our ways of working.
Team pains in MVP phase
- time/pace
- working over-hours
- Jira tickets misaligned
- requirements not clear/ready for work
- repetitive conversations
- decision making
- designing, developing and user researching concurrently (needed, but painful)
Identified causes
- too much work-in-progress
- not ‘finishing’ – constantly iterating
- no overall responsibility for tickets
- no ‘pipeline’ of work that UR could plan from
- not very good refinement process
How we improved ways of working
Introduced Kanban - a lean Agile workflow management:
- flow from left to right - on a Jira ticket board
- limits on number of tickets in a column eg a design team could have no more than 4 tickets ‘in progress’ in the design research column
- sign offs where work is ‘done’ for design and dev/test
- refinement sessions for design and dev in the same room
MoSCoW ratings ie Must Should Could Won’t
A backlog tickets in Jira was prioritised so everyone knew where efforts needed to be focused:
- user researchers had a clear view of our intentions
- consensus and mutual understanding
- everyone contributed
- agreed and explicit
- iterated 2 or 3 times, but soon we weren’t asking for any alterations
Outcomes to improving WoW
The team liked this way of working because it was:
- structured yet flexible to adapt to priorities or research findings
- sustainable pace
- the mindset of the team was one of adding value and moving on fast
- developers and testers were protected from changes – more able to release
- the team completed all work to schedule
