Introduction

One of the coolest facts about our work as hands-on consultants is that we are constantly confronted with more or less new problems.

Fittingly, the product development process according to Scrum had reached its limits at one of our clients. Although their software developers and designers were organized into individual Scrum teams, this felt more like a forced measure for everyone involved, as they mostly worked on completely different problems. Features demanded by the market often had a high lead time – compared to the competition – due to late escalations either by software development or by UX designers. Innovative topics were hardly tackled anymore because there was almost no time left in everyday life.

Specifically, the Product Owner, as the only link between the teams, was on the verge of burnout. Again and again, he had to mediate between the designers and developers. The designers – highly creative people – had great ideas that they threw over the fence to the developers at various times. The developers – highly focused people – constantly pointed out that their ideas could not be implemented and that the demanded spontaneity endangered the sprint goal.

Product Development Process

Our client had simply dumped both groups into one Scrum team without major adjustments. With the results so far, however, it was clear that a redesign of the approach was necessary, which would motivate the teams to collaborate more while also accelerating the innovation process and increasing its quality.

The solution was to understand what tasks the teams primarily had to solve and to react to them rather than running a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Based on previous results, consultations with the team and stakeholders, it became clear that the work on the product had a strong innovative character.

A suitable product development process for this can, roughly speaking, be divided into two phases: Product Discovery and Delivery. Discovery serves to explore potential solutions. Delivery is for providing ready-to-use software. Traditionally, UX staff handles the definition, and developers are responsible for implementation.

Our recommendation was an approach that combines discovery and delivery: Dual Track Agile. But first things first.

Organizing Collaboration

Dual Track Agile is a concept first addressed by Desiree Sy (“Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design”, in: Journal of Usability Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 3, May 2007, pp.: 112-132; agile-ucd - parallel track dev.pdf). Martin Cagan and Jeff Patton further developed the concept in their seminars. Back then under the name Dual Track Scrum (cf. Dual-Track Agile | Silicon Valley Product Group).

The approach combines various methods and approaches: Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Lean UX, and Agile. This concept envisions that the entire innovation process is managed by one team but runs on two tracks. These run parallel to each other.

The graphic above shows the parallel tracks of product discovery and development throughout the entire product design and delivery process. These constantly - very in a controlled manner - stimulate each other and form the basis for new hypotheses. You can see this and find it explained in great detail here as well: Dual Track Development is not Duel Track – We help you… or here: How Dual-Track Development can save you from the feature factory.

Certainly, there are simpler solutions to redesign the collaboration between teams. For instance, we could start by improving communication between the teams and standardizing their goals. However, that wouldn’t advance the innovation process.

With Dual Track Agile, we elegantly solve the problem. Discovery and delivery have different approaches to tackling tasks, yet both must work synchronously on common goals. Handoff points, joint meetings, etc., are well coordinated.

Benefits

So far, so good. Our client, however, wondered what specific benefits Dual Track Agile has to offer. After all, the implementation meant additional secondary effort for coordination between discovery and delivery. Formulated provocatively, one could just rely on two separate teams again.

Cooperation Advantage through Explicit Collaboration

Dual Track Agile is an approach to integrate user experience designers into agile development teams and to support cross-team collaboration without giving up the benefits - such as “fail fast” - from agile product development. To this end, solutions are presented for collaboration, more specifically knowledge management, communication, and coordination, which development teams struggle with.

In the discovery track, the team’s goal is to figure out what to build next. This can include research, design, and testing activities. The teams focus on validating ideas and solutions before they are sent to the delivery track.

Typically, developers are not the main actors in the discovery track. Nevertheless, they can take on several important tasks during this phase:

• Providing advice on technical feasibility;
• Conducting prototyping;
• Estimating development time and costs, which can influence prioritization;
• Gathering feedback and suggestions, especially during Design Thinking workshops that benefit from the diversity of participants.

In addition to the above discovery activities, teams work on building and delivering the product increments in the delivery track. Designers take care of, for example:

• Advising on the feasibility of design ideas;
• Implementing design decisions;
• Prototyping and UI design;
• Conducting quality control and testing;
• Finding solutions for emerging design problems.

As you can see, cooperation is made explicit and demanded. The whole thing can even be mapped very well via a product backlog, with a sprint goal and in dailies. A real team spirit emerges and - as we observed - the clarity of the tasks leads to a direct improvement in collaboration.

Speed Advantage through Greater Efficiency

Dual Track Agile helps avoid unnecessary development work, as ideas are constantly validated and only those that deliver value to the customer are developed. You can think of this track as continuously filling the backlog with refined and validated stories. The focus is on learning and adapting based on these findings. We want to learn as quickly, cheaply, and safely as possible. So speed is also important in discovery – but this is learning velocity. This contributes to improving efficiency and reducing waste.

Risk Minimization through Customer Orientation

A well-planned and adequately coordinated discovery track positively influences quality - is the right thing delivered to the customer - as it ensures the following:

• Developing collaboration between discovery and delivery
• Establishing a coordinated customer focus for both groups
• Enabling a separate approach - tailored to the tasks
• Meeting customer expectations
• Delivering what was promised
• Allowing all involved experts to develop an actionable idea
• Investing resources only in ideas confirmed by early validation
• Only keeping the truly important features
• Avoiding so-called Feature Creep (what’s actually faster than not doing things?)

Conclusion

We have shown that collaboration - if necessary - between UX and development can be easily realized on paper. Dual Track Agile helps enormously, but when applied, it also requires quite a bit of brainpower. What exactly do we mean by that? We’ll show you soon with “Dual Track Agile and its Implementation”.

Images and other credits!

• Cover image: Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash