When your teams are finally humming along with agile, you could be ready to level up with Dual Track. With Dual Track Agile, Discovery Sprints act as a feeder for Delivery Sprints. Why does this matter? It allows the teams to enhance and better predict the success of product features, thereby maximizing salience and further minimizing risk. Discovery becomes the main driver of customer experience strategy. Said another way, with Dual Track Agile your team uses continuous learning to inform continuous delivery and improvement. It is your innovation machine.
The Discovery backlog is typically loaded with all things UX—investigations and hypotheses to be researched, new customers, trends or product features to be explored, and failures to be studied. Next, Discovery Sprints use the Design Thinking process to explore possibilities and conduct small experiments to test ideas. The Delivery team then plugs these validated ideas into their backlog and the cycle continues.
Discovery is the secret sauce that enables your teams to stay several steps ahead by keeping a trained eye on your competition, your category, cultural trends, emerging technology and new customer needs and desires. This is likely already happening somewhere in your organization. But just imagine if the people with all the consumer insights were put in constant contact with your delivery teams. Building it into your process with Dual Track Agile is a seamless way to do that.
Another reason to adopt Dual Track agile is to expand your opportunity trees. The tendency of agile delivery teams is to get busy churning on the first few ideas. It is human nature to put on our fix it hats and go with initial ideas that could or would work. We use our logical, critical brain function to find a solution and presto….Done! And after all, if it fails, it is ok because we are still learning. But because Dual Track uses the design thinking process, your teams will be trained to use convergent and divergent thinking to build out your opportunity trees into actual trees, not a couple of twigs. It helps to prevent solutioning too quickly by offering the team multiple options for comparison. How can you know which direction to take without having something to compare to? Having lots of options is a better decision making problem to have than a handful of failures months down the road.
So, when you are ready to level up by adding a CX/UX command center to help complete your innovation machine, implement Dual Track Agile. We can show you how.