Written by 
Manage UX backlogs the Agile way
If your UX team partners with an agile development team, you know that staying ahead of the curve is crucial (and avoiding mid-sprint fire drills and unpleasant curve balls even more).
A key element to delivering better results and minimizing disruptions is robust planning and organization of your backlog. After a turbulent semester with unexpected shifts in priorities, our partners decided to move from Semester Planning to Continuous Planning. Our UX team adapted to align with their cadence and continue providing inputs to our roadmaps.
Continuous Planning embeds better UX in the agile process software development operates on.
Semester Planning
Before we moved to continuous planning, our team worked at a semester cadence. We would meet with our partners to review plans, request UX dependencies, and negotiate our capacity to commit to the work. While this system allowed us to plan ahead, the challenge came with change. There were little touchpoints during our milestones (2-month sprints), making alignment hard and resulting in last-minute asks due to poor…