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Just because you use Agile terms like daily stand-up, working in sprints, and maintaining a burndown chart doesn’t mean your team workflow is agile.
Too often, design teams using Agile terms are engaged in a disguised waterfall approach, where each phase of a product must be completed before the next one begins. It’s an unnecessarily rigid approach to development.
What’s more, teams prioritize the completion of a product at the expense of properly documenting processes and components.
Capturing 3 types of content in development
During the development phase of a product, teams need to be able to capture 3 types of content:
Content that's in the design system, or library of components, processes, and guidelines.
Guidance for how to use the content in the design system.
Content that is part of the design, whether as simple as a headline, or something more complex like code, UI strings, instance data of a database, or the text specific to the piece of software the team is building.
Too often, teams might wait to finalize all content and design elements before actually beginning development which is a linear, or waterfall approach. Not truly Agile.
Most designers and engineers go to the design system and then pick and choose the components they think they’ll need.
Beginning with design and engineering relegates content as almost an afterthought.
What agility in design systems looks like
Instead, I teach teams to begin with content—where you can. And build everything else as you go.
Design systems bring content to its full fruition in digital work.
When we have the content to start with, whether that's content that solves a user need or something that actually has some value to the end user — now we have the makings of a genuinely agile system.
Go straight to an HTML editor and write out the content in plain text — even when the content is a placeholder.
Start populating and displaying the content through some sort of UI mechanism or component.
Open the file in a browser. Engineers and designers can work together at this point, applying art direction, components, logic, flow, and function — inside a software environment.
This process — using a functional design system — drastically reduces the stop-and-start of more traditional pseudo-Agile approaches.
Authentic agility is more like a convergence of rivers than a waterfall. Rivers of content — of all three types of content — can converge at any point.
Your entire team is building little tributaries that flow into larger streams and, eventually, they take you to the ocean.
And it doesn’t matter where these convergences flow. Your team accepts what’s there and keeps moving to the next step.
5 minute collaboration sprint
Let me encourage you to give this method a try. It may seem mind-blowing and may require a bit of practice, but you can make this a fun team exercise.
Get your team together and give them a piece of content. Have them spend a few minutes talking through how the content could be displayed to the user.
Then give the team five minutes to try five things in a common digital environment and see what your team can do. Together.
No waiting for the designer. No waiting for the engineer.
Instead, communicate inside a digital context using text or whatever language or code is relevant to the next step in the process.
Now you’re thinking past the components, and into the final product.
