In an ideal Agile world, the Scrum team is always completing all the selected user stories at the end of the sprint. In the real world however, there might be some product backlog items that don’t have a “done” status, but are only partially finished. Should you split them for the next sprint? This article gives you 4 reasons why it is a bad idea to split unfinished product backlog items.

User stories are one of the main format to record user needs in the Agile world. There is however a debate on the amount of information that should be available to the Scrum team before starting the sprint. In this article, Zuzi Šochová recommends to minimize the size of user stories and to define simple conditions of satisfaction instead of writing acceptance criteria.

UX practitioners often use the power of storytelling in their work — personas, scenarios, and UX stories all incorporate specific details and cause-and-effect relationships to make user needs more concrete and persuasive for designers and stakeholders. But, like any tool, these narrative techniques are risky when misused.

As the product owner, you are responsible for the product’s vision, and ultimately, the value of your product. You “own” the backlog. If your responsibilities include upstream product management—what I refer to as strategic product ownership—then you also shepherd your product through its entire lifecycle. Bottom line, your prime responsibility is deciding what to build and when to build it. Your decisions guide not just the health and well being of your product, but also all the people engaged in product discovery and delivery. Yet a common product ownership struggle I see in agile teams—regardless of industry and product type—is determining how to make decisions. As an agile coach, I use a pattern I call “Decide How to Decide.” It’s a simple technique to help people make transparent, participatory, and trusted decisions.

Help audiences empathize with users and buy into your design goals with well- crafted stories that build insight and focus on users and their needs.

The primary goal of creating a minimum viable product is not to build something, but instead to learn something. For Ries, who was working at a startup consisting almost entirely of engineers, the easiest way to get their product in front of prospective customers was to build and launch an initial version of it. Hence, the minimum viable product, or MVP.

This article provides an overview of a product design process, then discusses some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this article focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design.

Product backlog refinement (or grooming) is an important activity in Scrum projects where user stories are prioritizes, right-sized and estimated. In his book “Agile Reflections”, Robert Galen provides some hints about how to verify that that product backlog grooming has been done successfully and that the right requirements information is available for the next sprint.

Resist the urge to lead with implementation. Once you know what the need is, you’ll know what to build.

Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs. While maps take a wide variety of forms depending on context and business goals, certain elements are generally included, and there are underlying guidelines to follow that help them be the most successful.