The Integration of Experience
Design, Agile and DevOps
Salina Brown, Chett Rubenstein & Ray Young
The benefits of establishing agile rela-
tionships to capture user feedback
early while building software faster is a
no brainer. Yet, most organizations are
still struggling to get there.
Dr. James Patell, a founding core faculty member of
the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the
d-School), believes in human-centered design,
achieved through the establishment of true empathy.
In his teaching he says, “We must fill in two blanks:
Our users need a better way to __ BECAUSE __. The
because portion is a big deal.”
But at CTP, continuous feedback loops are supported
by rapid deployment in our SDLC to ensure we deliver
value at speed. We believe the more appropriate
phase is:
“We must fill in three blanks: Our users need a better
way to ___ BECAUSE ___ and we will be able to
DEPLOY ___ to production environment for tomor-
row morning’s beta release.”
We’ve expanded Dr. Patell’s thinking to account for
the DevOps function in our software development
life cycle. Experience Design helps articulate the
“BECAUSE” by capturing user feedback early and
facilitating collaborative problem solving. But with-
out the rapid “DEPLOY”, we cannot continually incor-
porate those insights back into our products or solu-
62 | THE DOPPLER | SPRING 2017
tions. Embracing DevOps and Experience Design
empowers us to iterate and quickly respond to mar-
ket changes.
DevOps is not about software, it’s about communica-
tion and collaboration. Much like DevOps, which fos-
ters collaboration and communications between
software engineering, operations and product, Expe-
rience Design fosters collaboration and communica-
tions between software engineering, the product and
its users. However, managing collaboration across
software engineering, operations, the product and
users is no small feat.
Breaking Down the Silos
Today most large organizations are led by centralized
leadership that want to optimize for predictability
and efficiency, rather than innovation. They assemble
static teams by function, binding a team member’s
identity to that function - e.g. “I am an Engineer. I
code.” The organizational transformation required to
establish agile relationships between teams supports
Experience Design and DevOps methodologies, but
often threatens one’s personal and organizational
identity. When threatened, team members often
retreat to neatly defined roles, reinforcing silos and
resisting collaborative work.
We are not suggesting that you dump your current
organizational model for a holacratic one, or swap
traditional titles for made up ones like, “Manager of
Fantastic Awesomeness.” However, we find that when