Dual-Track Lean Agile UX

Unlike staggered sprint cycles, Dual-track scrum maintains 2 separate backlogs, discovery and delivery. Items are added to the delivery backlog once they have gone through a discovery process.

Why does dual-track work for PVX?

PVX is a complex local TV software. Ideation and prototyping are not difficult. however, validating the idea with the stakeholders and users is a complex process with a lot of use cases that need to be considered exhaustively. And sometimes that means many rounds of iteration with many small but important details within the finished prototype.

Being a B2B SaaS software, PVX also doesn’t focus too much on aesthetics. The UI work is often there for the product to be intuitive and understandable. It didn’t need groundbreaking and unconventional design approaches, what PVX needed is ways for the buyers from agencies and sellers from Stations and Rep Firms to understand their workflow and design language. It’s there to solve industry issues and save time.

Due to the complexity of the software as a whole, the discovery & Design stages are much more time-consuming than the scrum sprints. However, the implementation is also difficult and full of challenges with many backend databases and APIs at work, therefore almost all projects handed off to the dev team require many rounds of smaller sprints and QA in order to be implemented effectively.
As a result, the dev backlog is massive with numerous technical debt on top of the UX debts. That gives the product team a lot of time to design and test many iterations of the product.

I started working for PVX after covid outbreak. Working from home became the new norm and a lot of UX work has to be change from phiscal collaboration such as blackboard process-mapping and stick-it notes story-mapping to a digital approach. For more details into what work is involved in each step of the scrum process please view my other process steps in click here.

So what does a typical UX team look like?

For the discovery phase, the scrum team usually consists of a Developer, a designer, a Product Owner, and 2 business analysts.
The PVX product team has 2 UX designers, 4 business analysts, 1 product owner (VP of Product), which means we usually handle 2 (or more) projects running on parallel verticals at the same time. PVX is a massive product with many moving parts and UI interconnecting with each other, so

As the product team handled more and more projects, we found it was essential to include 2 senior developers who function as product managers in the discovery phase. We wanted to be the discovery phase to be more rooted in reality from a dev feasibility point of view. 1 Business team member with areas of expertise sometimes would join the project to give us an outside perspective based on the project’s target user type.

Getting earlier stakeholder buy-in saved us a lot of time working on and rethinking concepts.