Try Design Thinking + Scrum
The Lean & Agile Practitioner
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…
