More Collaborative and Meaningful Approach to Product Design Planning

Episode 8, in which we discuss why development sprint planning might not be the best option to plan design initiatives and what to do instead.

Today, we will discuss why development sprint planning sessions do not work particularly for designers and what, as a designer, you can do instead. You’ll learn how to make design planning sessions more collaborative, meaningful, and effective. The concrete game plan, ready to be implemented, is waiting for you at the end of this article.

Designers collaborate with everyone

Designers working in tech are not lone riders. They are part of bigger groups called either Product Teams or Development Teams. Such a group usually consists of software engineers, quality assurance (QA) engineers, and a PM (Product Manager) in a product environment or a PJM (Project Manager) in project-based endeavors. Designers work closely with all of these people but with different purposes.

Usually, the goal of cooperating with a PM would be gathering business requirements, validating ideas through diverse experiments, and testing solutions with the users. Designers excel at facilitating workshops, talking to u…