What

The product team were working dysfunctionally - features were being prioritised with little justification, the clients were feeling confused and team members were left unheard. The delivery of the product was stalling.

Why

The team were not clear on where responsibilities lay, nor who needed what information to progress the product. The communication within the team was poor.

Action

I diagnosed the issue after feeling unheard myself, realising that the development team and analyst team didn’t have any clear expectations of how the sub-teams would work together.

I took action to establish common ways of working from within my UCD team. I scheduled regular sessions within each sprint in which the researchers could play back to those in charge of sprint planning. I also established clear expectations of attendance - researchers were to attend sprint planning, devs were to attend research observations every other sprint.

Impact

By providing expected work patterns, all team members were empowered to ask to be heard. The team began to work more efficiently, finding opportunities to parallelise the development and testing of features. Sprints were planned with more knowledge and insight into user needs and the resultant development was more efficient because of it.