I crashed the UX Book Club here in LA this past week. Actually, I did technically join the group right before attending, but I didn't get a chance to read the book. 

The title was Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf. I had heard a bit about it and wanted to get some perspective from the author first. Kind of backwards, I know. 

The discussion was great and Jeff had some really solid insights! Here are my notes from the conversation: 

• It became apparent that if UX and Agile were going to coexist, the whole notion of creating products needed to change.

• We should always focus on outcomes, not things like features. 

• Small, self-reliant, and cross-functional teams get stuff done. Preferably ones that are co-located; or, at the very least, in the same time zone. (And what’s the optimal team size? Well, Jeff Bezos likes to say one that can be fed by two pizzas). 

• Consider product design as a series of rapid experiments rather than hard and fast 'requirements.' 

• The overall goal of Lean ‘anything’ is to reduce waste. Here, we’re especially concerned with the UX wasted on creating deliverables for stuff that never gets built. 

• Our job as design leaders should be to extract ideas out of people’s heads around the problem statement (i.e., “We believe that doing [this] will achieve [this] outcome.”) You then have something of a hypothesis and a starting point. UX then essentially runs a series of experiments against that hypothesis.

• A backlog of user stories is basically a backlog of (ahem) assumptions (i.e., Do the users that you are targeting have this particular pain point? Let's find out...) 

• During estimation exercises, have the entire team sketch their understanding of what they’re going to be building. This uncovers lots of issues and gets at a shared understanding. That’s huge and ties into the author’s notion of “continuously deploying sketches.” Good stuff! 

• Consider introducing the concept of UX Debt to your teams and organization. This basically borrows from traditional technical debt, which engineering teams surely understand and Product Managers rarely question. By calling attention to experience shortcuts taken in this fashion, you can then allot a percentage of time in the next sprint to address some of the issues.

• Lastly, setting the expectations associated with a Lean UX process is key. UXers should communicate what services they will provide, but more importantly, they should outline what they expect from their teams in return, as well. The entire product team needs to be committed and involved from the very beginning and throughout. You can’t do things like prioritize a backlog without their input. (I’ve seen that happen way too often and it amounts to frustation within teams and a sub-par product.) 

I really like this last point because it gets at UXers delivering more in the way of experience strategy and facilitating the type of thinking needed to create truly exceptional things.

Jeff also brought up a fun anecdote about having previously pitched the process to a prospective client... He and his firm were going up against a more traditional agency - one that asks some initial questions and then goes off for a few months to then come back with a grand "solution." 

After having described his approach, the client paused for a bit and then said something like: “So, with your process, we actually have to contribute and do stuff?” 

Bingo. 

That was pretty funny and nicely illustrated how the collaborative process should work in practice with Lean UX. 

A big thank you to Jeff for chatting with us! 

And yes, I just picked up the book. Look for some more thoughts on it soon. 

Marc