Breathing Room for Delight
Summary
- To ensure there was enough room for the right amount of research for the right problem while ensuring rapid delivery.
- To ensure that all members of the team from Product to Development could collaborate like a true cross-functional team to come up with solutions to problems.
- To ensure the team established the right metrics that spoke to the experience.
Key Insights
-
•
Early visions must balance ambition with technical feasibility to avoid unrealistic stakeholder expectations.
-
•
Collaborating early with engineering ensures technical constraints shape feasible designs.
-
•
Quick agile iterations without sufficient customer research can lead to reactive, tech-heavy solutions.
-
•
Cross-channel initiatives require dedicated time and space for proactive problem solving.
-
•
Design sprints are valuable for small focused problems but inadequate for complex, multi-dependency challenges.
-
•
Investing heavily in trendy methodologies without problem clarity can waste resources and stakeholder trust.
-
•
Separating discovery and delivery into parallel tracks creates breathing room for thoughtful design and faster delivery.
-
•
Connecting roles across discovery and delivery is crucial to maintain dialogue and alignment in an enterprise context.
-
•
Establishing a continuous culture of measuring and learning enables ongoing optimization post-delivery.
-
•
Flexible frameworks and push-pull partnerships allow large enterprises to tailor agile and design practices effectively.
Notable Quotes
"There’s no breathing room for design to conceive and execute a delightful solution in an enterprise."
"SAFE is essentially a software development methodology, and fitting experience design into it has been a constant trial and error."
"While we built amazing visions, it would take around three years to build the technical capabilities and integrations needed."
"Quick agile experiments made experiences technically feasible but led to tech-heavy solutions with little customer focus."
"Design sprints were good but not appropriate for our team’s maturity or complex multi-channel problems."
"Finding the right method for the problem is important; don’t drink the Kool-Aid just because the preacher says to."
"Discovery and delivery run parallel without a time dependency on each other, giving breathing room to think and act."
"Design can no longer sit in a corner and complain about not having a seat at the table; partnerships enable progress."
"A brick and mortar enterprise with multiple operations will not always have a prescribed process; you need to carve what works for you."
"It’s never over; it’s a continuous process of improvement."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Think of AI not as a magic eight ball, but as a highly educated intern that can help with routine tasks."
Mark Interrante Harry MaxAI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
July 11, 2024
"What if we are optimizing ourselves into relevance?"
Patrizia BertiniThe (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG
September 11, 2025
"Reducing buttons from six to two and including peripheral information facilitated buying and editing while increasing conversion by 10%."
Shan ShenTranslating UX Terms into Business Contexts
November 29, 2023
"Feature roadmaps are bad because over time coherent actions become noise."
Adam ThomasSurvival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
December 6, 2022
"Research is inherently a silo-busting activity because customers experience the whole, not just parts divided by departments."
Robin BeersResearch as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
March 12, 2021
"Accessibility isn’t just about visible disabilities; it’s about invisible disabilities and situational impairments too."
Sheri Byrne-HaberAccessibility at Scale
June 9, 2021
"Design shares are more about presenting finished work and practice defending it, not about peer-to-peer feedback."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"You gotta write that charter to get clarity with your team."
Deanna Washington Bria Alexander Jon Fukuda Saara Kamppari-Miller Farid SabitovConnecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle
September 9, 2022
"Equal solutions still leave some people out; tailoring based on needs actually provides equity."
Aaron Stienstra Lashanda HodgeLeveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
December 8, 2021
