As a UX Designer, What Is My Place In Scrum?

Scrum and the stakeholders, episode 6

The ‘Scrum and the stakeholders’ series discusses the place of several stakeholders in Scrum. All its articles have this theme and can be read on their own.

Many organisations have a special place for UX designers. They operate as advisors for multiple Scrum Teams. They interact with the Scrum Team during refinement, elaborating on how they envision the UX of the product. They are also present at the Sprint Review to inspect the Increment and discuss further developments with the team and other stakeholders.

By moritz320 at Pixabay

Does this sound familiar to you? If so, then your Scrum adoption may need some tweaking. Here’s a pivotal snippet of the Scrum Guide to elaborate:

“The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. […]. Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team.” — Scrum Guide 2017

For Scrum Teams to be successful all skills to produce and increment must be within a team. If a UX designer works outside the team, then this impedes them. If a Scrum Team wishes to be effective, then the UX designer should be part of that team too.

You may wonder why this is important. Well:

“The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity.” — Scrum Guide 2017

This may not be a sufficient answer to you. Because it doesn’t state why this is the case. Then this definition of Scrum can help:

“Scrum (n) : A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.” — Scrum Guide 2017

Scrum Teams have all skills required to accomplish the work in a complex product environment. If your team is depending on skills outside of the team, then this hurts their creativity and productivity. It weakens the ability of the team to deliver products of the highest possible value. Here are some aspects to this:

• During the Sprint, if unforeseen complexity occurs, the team needs to come up with a solution on the fly. Without everyone in the team, this may impact the quality of the product negatively.
• Time-to-market of features will increase due to ping-ponging with people outside the team. Feedback on the UX requires additional steps that are bound to take more time than with everyone in the same team.
• If someone with a pivotal influence on the state of the product resides outside of the team, a team can’t take full responsibility for what happens to the product. This also negatively impact creativity.
• UX arrives at the stakeholders in a fragmented way and not as part of the complete product. With that, stakeholders can’t inspect a “Done” product resulting in wrong decisions about the direction of a product.

Conclusion

A UX designer should be part of the Scrum Team. All skills necessary to build your product should be in the team. To depend on skills not part of the team cripples the creativity and productivity of the team. In the end, this hurts the value of the product.

You may have too few UX designers for all your Scrum Teams. This can’t be an excuse to exclude them from a Scrum Team. If you can’t resolve this, then let other people step up. Perhaps the existing UX designers can educate colleagues. Whatever you do, make sure that the UX designer skills become part of the team.

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