Agile excellence: How to streamline discovery for maximum Impact

Discovery in Agile is about learning what users need and want. Agile isn’t just about working fast; it’s about making small, valuable improvements for users. When we do discovery, we learn essential information that helps us build better products.

Sometimes, people find it hard to do discoveries in Agile. They might skip it or rush through it. But it’s crucial to make time for discovery so we can create better products.

Challenges of Discovery in Agile

Many teams struggle to fit discovery into Agile because of tight deadlines and a focus on delivering features quickly. This can lead to ignoring essential research or trying to complete it all within one sprint. This approach can be risky, as it may result in poorly informed decisions and products that don’t meet users’ needs.

Scaling Discovery in Agile

Instead of skipping discovery, try scaling it down. Focus on the most important questions and activities. Here are some tips to help you do that:

1. Share your findings: Use meetings, such as standup meetings, to talk about what you’ve learned. Write a short summary (one-page recap) and share it with your team. When possible, use physical or digital sticky notes to create an organized evidence board to communicate findings and show progress.
2. Plan for discovery: Talk to your team about when you’ll need time for discovery. Add a “spike” to your sprint backlog to make time for it. (A “spike” is a research task in Agile.) Constrain spikes to 1-2 key questions and choose research methods that will provide specific answers. Complete spikes as early as possible in the sprint.
3. Discuss what you know: Talk about what you know and don’t know about the problem. Have each team member fill out a problem or opportunity statement using the same template or evidence board. This will help you figure out what you need to learn and where conflicts or knowledge gaps exist.
4. Choose discovery activities: Pick a few important activities to do, like talking to stakeholders, technical research, analyzing competitors, checking analytics, examining past research, new user research, or heuristic evaluation. You don’t need to do every possible activity, just the most valuable ones for your specific questions or assumptions.
5. Involve your team: Everyone on your Agile team should help with discovery. Assign tasks to the right people, and make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. The entire Agile team needs to participate; creating great experiences takes more than quality code or design. Working together in discovery means time saved in delivery, as the team will have the same understanding of the problem or opportunity.
6. Estimate how long it will take: Discovery might take one sprint or several sprints. That’s okay, as long as you’re making progress. It doesn’t matter whether it wraps up in a single sprint or spans multiple sprints. The goal isn’t just to get the activities done; it’s to get the critical information needed to deliver value and lower risk as soon as possible.
7. Learn and share: Share what you’ve learned as you go, instead of waiting until the end of the discovery process. Analyze, synthesize, and communicate the information learned to avoid wasting time on end-of-discovery analysis paralysis.
8. Make decisions: Decide together if you have enough information to move forward. If not, figure out what else you need to learn. Do you need more? Can you get that information in this sprint or the next? Do your plans need to stay on hold until you have more information? Or can you move forward with meaningful ideation, given the learning and evidence you have? Make this decision together and stick to it!

Tips for Success in Discovery

Here are some things that can help you succeed with discovery in Agile:

• Make sure UX is part of your team’s leadership. UX leaders can initiate and maintain dialogue to ensure that UX is involved early and often to anticipate the need for upcoming discoveries.
• Track how much time you save by doing discovery. For any sceptics who focus on velocity or feature delivery over discovery, Scrum masters or delivery managers can help UX practitioners track how discovery speeds up decision-making and increases the quality of the decisions made.
• Don’t assign tasks before you’ve finished discovery. We don’t want engineers to start building a solution before we know whether it has the potential to succeed. If discovery reveals we can’t do much technically to solve a problem, or there are internal process constraints, it will be wasteful to shift priorities or stop abruptly after delivery has started.
• Use templates and processes to make discovery more efficient. Establish repeatable processes for scheduling sessions, recruiting users or stakeholders, developing tasks and interview questions, sharing findings, ideation, and decision-making. These processes will make discovery more efficient and less daunting.

Discovery in Agile is about learning in small steps. Focus on the most important activities and questions, and involve the entire team in the process. By scaling discovery and making it a priority, you can gather the information necessary to make informed decisions about the next steps in the pursuit of value. To succeed with discovery in Agile, scale it, don’t skip it. This approach will help your team create better products that truly meet the needs of your users.

Key Takeaways

• Agile prioritizes small, high-value increments through informed discovery, not just speed.
• Scale Agile discovery by focusing on valuable activities and targeted questions.
• Include the entire Agile team in discovery for great user experiences.
• Prioritize valuable activities to acquire crucial information within realistic timelines.
• Success in Agile discovery relies on scaling the process and making informed decisions.