Lean UX - Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

2021

Introduction

I was searching for books that could help me be a successful project manager. We’ve learned about agile in past software engineering classes, sprints, that sort of thing. This book introduced me to the concept of lean principles. I checked out some other books related to lean so I could learn more, because I felt like this concept reasonated with the way I want to run this project.

General thoughts

There was a big focus on the Lean UX Canvas, which was designed for companies to help figure out the business and user needs before jumping into designing a project. Coming up with a solution is step 5. So I think this book made its point clear, and reinforced with me that planning and testing is essential before we even start brainstorming features. The pieces of the canvas helped to work with my project plan writeup, particularly for writing up the problem and outcome. The author emphasizes having workshops where everyone is involved in writing up this canvas, over several days. While that sounds like it would be effective for teams at a company working full-time, we only have so much time. I want to use the brainstorming strategies (we’re going to need a bunch of post-its and whiteboard markers) for working out the features and solving the problem.

How it relates to the project/takeaways

This book gave me some ideas on how I can write up a plan for this project. I was initially not really sure on what to put week-by-week. But this gave me some ideas. It’s going to change over time as we see how the process works and what our research reveals to us.

There are helpful templates for writing hypotheses, problems, and success criteria. I used the template on page 43 and page 78 has one for hypotheses, which I plan to use later. This week’s topic for me is to work on user personas and stories so I will be referring to this book for suggestions on how to accomplish this.

Conclusion

Even though I already read it, I’m renewing this for another session so I can refer back to it. It was that helpful and relevant!

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