My organization is in the middle of a shift towards agile; some projects are there others have not fully made the jump yet.
I would agree with others that the best role for a UX person is not the product owner, but a dedicated role on the team. POs really have to have many faces: they're accountable to customers for understanding their wants and needs, to upper management for justifying the existence of a product and making sure that there is enough time and money to build it properly, and finally to the development team for making final decisions on any number of features, scope, etc. I would think that it would be very difficult for a UX person to handle all of these responsibilities (though there is some overlap with what we do) as well as all the detailed work of discovery, design and validation. That being said, I think it is really important for the PO to rely heavily on the UX person/team in informing some of her decisions; these two roles need to be tightly coupled together so as to best reconcile multiple incoming streams of information pertaining to customer needs (i.e. from a marketing/business perspective, any ethnographic and usability work that has been done, etc.). I think that the product owner and the UX person need to understand the customer in different (but equally valuable) ways, but both these levels of understanding need to be taken as a whole when making decisions. One more comment about UX in agile: I've found it very difficult to participate fully in the agile process (task boards, standups, being assigned stories, etc.) as I often have many projects I'm working on at a time (as opposed to a developer's single focus for any given sprint). It can be more difficult to commit to tasks/stories in a given time frame because there are a lot of competing priorities, not just unexpected blocks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48601 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
