I often see User Experience (UX) Designers struggle to align focus, work, and approach with Scrum Teams building increments of product in iterations of 30 days or fewer. Common concerns and questions I hear include:
- "Developers aren't really interested in the user, they just want to build."
- "I'm trying to work side-by-side with the team, but I'm always a bit ahead of them, so what should we talk about in our Daily Scrum?"
- "I don't work in sort cycles, or tactically. My work is strategic."
- "Why don't developers use my design artifacts and decisions? Why do they never go back and refactor for good design? Why do I feel like I never have any influence?!?!"
These challenges often result in tenuous relationships between UX Designers (UXDs) and Scrum Teams — or even worse, distrust, separation, and "staggered Sprints" (where completely separate teams pass work to each other that they execute in completely separate blocks of time, which they still call "Sprints" — even though those blocks of time function exactly the same as waterfall phases).