About this Case Study
In many agile environments, roles like product owner or UX designer act as the Keepers of the User. This was how it was at Redgate, a company known for usability of tough technical products. When we found our user focus waning, we had to do some soul-searching: personas and user stories? There must be something more!
After some false starts, we hit on a change that worked: development teams responsible and empowered to do the research that powers their decisions. Not only has this improved developer engagement, it's also delivered for the business through software that solves user problems better.
In this session, we explore the challenges of bringing customers’ experience into everyday decision-making, including motivating change and lowering the barriers with agile teams. We’ll talk about some overall strategies that have worked for us and some that didn’t.
In particular, we'll go through examples of:
- 4 proven approaches to help whole teams really engage
- 4 ways to ensure customer knowledge flows through to business stakeholders
You will leave this session with new ideas of how to really get the user at the heart of your software development.
Learning outcomes:
- understand a model of change to embed the users at the heart of products and services
- identify the time and skills challenges that prevent the ‘right’ people from doing research
- get fresh ideas for supporting teams in taking on customer research
- gain tools for working out how to maximise business benefit of customer contact
About the Speaker
Elizabeth Ayer is a portfolio manager at Redgate Software, a company with 15 years' experience in database lifecycle management. In her time there, she has investigated dozens of teams' software delivery processes. Above all, she is ridiculously passionate about shipping high-quality software fast.
ElizAyer