4 ms·
The "insanely detailed deliverables from design" is a red flag and indicates a factory conveyor belt mentality: product comes up with idea, hands off idea to de
by danjac 4y ago
The "insanely detailed deliverables from design" is a red flag and indicates a factory conveyor belt mentality: product comes up with idea, hands off idea to design, design hands off to developers, who then have to implement the design down to the pixel. The "hand-off" approach is incredibly wasteful and counter-productive.
The design team should be building designs in tandem with input from developers and product, so that the final agreed-upon design takes into account business requirements and technical constraints.
Nor should this be "final" in the sense that during implementation there may be unexpected problems that require modification of that design - "hey, turns out this widget doesn't work in Safari, we're going to have to come up with a workaround". As long as what comes out in the end is a usable implementation of the business requirement, it doesn't matter whether it matches some arbitrary design ideas from three months ago.
- whstl 4y agoYep, good observations. One of the main complaints was that we regressed to a waterfall process and we were doing Scrum only for show.
- danjac 4y agoI think the problem with agile (whatever the exact flavour) is that if you don't adopt the mindset across the organization, and just enforce it in your dev team, you just end up with waterfall-with-extra-steps.
- whstl 4y agoGood point. In this case we had a misapplied "dual-track agile" structure, which in theory means the whole organization is "doing agile", but since the feedback loop is super long, it's indeed just waterfall-with-extra-steps. This is not the first time I see this happening. Product Managers love it. IMO it is classic micromanagement. Product Managers want more control of the process than is afforded by a "self managing agile team", so the only chance of control is achieved by isolating team communication and having "small" deliverables that they have full control over. IMO that's alright, but it's waterfall. You can't expect the advantages of an agile process to apply to this.