Supercharge your Agile with Human-Centered Design We combined Human-Centered Design (HCD) with Agile for a “best of both worlds” approach that achieved striking results.

Challenges were :

1. These professions have different mindsets and often struggle to speak to one another. HCD Practitioners are used to spending most of their time in the problem space while Agilists tend to think and work more in the solution space.

2. Planning HCD work, especially at scale, can be tricky because HCD teams plan their work slightly ahead of development teams.

3. Team topology can also be problematic.

Examples of our trial-and-error team topology experiments will be given and discussed with a focus on creating shared services HCD teams. In this Experience Report the authors will discuss our experiences inadvertently creating “Human-Centered Agile” at a large government agency. We will discuss lessons learned, specifically:

1. We developed an effective, lightweight “Research Roadmap” to visualize and plan HCD work just a little in advance of development work.

2. Team Topology: We found that having HCD skills at the team-of-teams level and having that work planned effectively works the best.

3. Using quantitative and qualitative HCD methods to drive “Continuous Evaluation” of released work results in better user outcomes and increases solution satisfaction. We will show attendees exactly how to do the same.

4. How to use HCD methods to help teams and Product Owners make good decisions earlier in the Cone of Uncertainty.