How Lean UX can help solve some common Agile challenges....

As I have spare time right now I have been reading a lot about Lean, Agile, Lean UX and Design Thinking. 

Now I have a little real-world experience of Agile and am genuinely concerned when I hear really experienced people say that “agile doesn’t work”. 

And as I get deeper into it then it’s dawned on me that the main problem with Agile is not that it doesn’t work but rather that it can sometimes take place in a context that doesn’t allow it to easily function. This context can all too easily bend its principles and application out of shape, so much so that people automatically conclude that it’s the process itself doesn’t work. 

This nicely presented video by Nick van Weerdenberg – with obvious real-world experience from the trenches – shows firstly what the main problems are with applying agile in many project contexts and secondly how Lean UX processes can help mitigate those problems. He likens the key problem to “friction across the boundaries” of Agile teams and that “Lean UX helps generate the conversations and artefacts in a way that feeds the process in a continuous improvement manner”. 

It’s all about employing simple UX processes, rather than the more traditional UX, to shift the process along rapidly.

Which is exactly the same sort of message - with a different flavour - that Jeff Gothelf develops in his recent Lean UX book (2016 edition). 

If you are at all interested in making Agile work then please review this video by Nick. Its brilliant, and really deserves a much wider audience than its achieved to date on You Tube (i.e. a mere 700 views).