Engineering our Design Teams

Working as a UX designer on an agile team opened my eyes to new ways to experiment and collaborate. Focusing on communication validated and empowered me to try new things and speak my mind. The agile engineers and I explicitly shared a common goal; we were flexible, built faster, and innovated. Conversely, I noticed that my design peers rarely worked collaboratively with other designers, and had little exposure to other design work. What if we could increase visibility and improve our innovation simply by allowing designers to collaborate the way agile engineering teams do?

Aiming to increase sharing not just within the respective product teams, but also with others in the design community, I took some of the engineers’ everyday principles and turned them into agile approaches the design team could practice for faster decision making, improved collaboration and increased overall designer satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll review five engineering principles and processes that can be directly translated to the design discipline.

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