Get your hands dirty: Gaining the trust of hard to reach users
Katrina Ryl
Have you ever tried to research a user group, but struggled to get in front of them using standard methods? Maybe they live somewhere with low connectivity. Maybe they're not digital natives. Maybe they're hostile to outsiders. Whatever the reason, they just aren't talking. Presented at UX Australia Design Research Conference 2021. Co-presented with Roland Wimbush
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Walk into any product organisation today and you'll find Agile rituals running on autopilot. Stand-ups at 9:15. Sprint planning every other Tuesday. A retro at the end. Burn-down charts pinned to a wall someone walks past on the way to the coffee machine. The mechanics are there. The roles are filled. The Jira board moves. And somehow, the team still ships things that don't quite work, blames each other when they don't, and quietly resents the process that was supposed to fix exactly that.
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Who Actually Does What on an Agile Team - and Why so Many Teams get it Wrong
Walk into any product organisation today and you'll find Agile rituals running on autopilot. Stand-ups at 9:15. Sprint planning every other Tuesday. A retro at the end. Burn-down charts pinned to a wall someone walks past on the way to the coffee machine. The mechanics are there. The roles are filled. The Jira board moves. And somehow, the team still ships things that don't quite work, blames each other when they don't, and quietly resents the process that was supposed to fix exactly that.
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Ever feel like your product roadmap is a beautifully timed train that constantly gets derailed by the "design bottleneck"? It’s a classic tech trap: features get the go-ahead, timelines get published, but an un-scoped design phase leads to rushed decisions, shifting mid-build requirements, and a staggering 26% of engineering time wasted on predictable rework. The truth is, your designers aren't slow, your planning process is just missing a shared baseline. Here is how a lightweight, structured Design Phase Delivery Framework can align your product, design, and engineering teams, stop late-stage scope creep, and finally protect your delivery timelines from going up in flames.