Try Design Thinking + Scrum

The Lean & Agile Practitioner

Takeshi Yoshida
9 min readSep 19, 2018
https://lifecycle.management

Design Thinking and Scrum are complementary Agile approaches, the former strong in Ideation, the latter in iterative building. Why not combine both?

Classic Scrum’s Achilles’ heel

One of the weak areas of classic Scrum, in my opinion, is the relative simplicity of the ideation phase. “What to build” is sometimes an arbitrary discussion during the Scrum Backlog building and Sprint Planning exercises, and too frequently I see people just listing up things “to do” in linear fashion, resulting in what Jeff Patton calls a “flat backlog”. Not enough thinking is put in to “what to build: why, for who, and how?”

The check-in question “Is this really what we’re supposed to be building?” is frequently pushed aside while everybody is absorbed in getting the Scrum up and running and maintaining the frantic pace of Sprints.

Patton’s User Story Mapping is one such approach to fixing this problem. It goes back to the crucial question, “Who are our users and what are we building for them?”, and applies a constructive yet laborious process to boil that down into a “user mapped backlog”. It’s a multi-day process with a lot of brain sweating and…

--

--

Takeshi Yoshida
Takeshi Yoshida

Written by Takeshi Yoshida

Chief Coach, Agile Organization Development (agile-od.com) — we are a tribe of change, transformation, innovation experts

Responses (4)