Lean UX and the SAFe Planning Increment Life Cycle

Note: This article is part of the Community Contributions series, which provides additional points of view and guidance based on the experiences and opinions of the extended SAFe community of experts.

Introduction

There’s a lot of confusion surrounding the definition of Lean User Experience (Lean UX) and how to incorporate both the Lean UX discipline and Lean UX experts into Scaled Agile methods like SAFe, while achieving fast feedback and a seamless user experience. When applying Lean UX processes at scale, feedback delays—which are far costlier than with smaller systems—magnify the confusion. This article describes how to structure a Lean UX Center of Excellence (LUXCE) to establish design standard governance across the value stream. It also describes how to leverage cross-functional Agile teams to implement Lean UX as a self-organizing function of PI execution.

A Brief Overview of Lean UX

Lean UX design is a mindset, culture, and a process that embraces Lean-Agile methods. It implements functionality in minimum viable increments, determining success by measuring results against a pre-stated benefit hypothesis. That hypothesis is tested early in the process through collaborative design methods within the Agile team. The results are then fed into a minimum marketable feature (MMF), which is evaluated by real users, whose feedback is then incorporated into the next benefit hypothesis cycle. This continues refinement and learning throughout the Lean UX process (see Figure 1).