Debbie Levitt

UX is driving you crazy, a black throwing off timelines and killing ideas. UX doesn’t seem Lean or Agile. They’re too siloed and not collaborating well with engineering. Can’t anybody make wireframes? Can’t we circumvent or exclude these people? Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-Centered Design process are good investments that more than pay for themselves. This session will explain how the UX process fits into Agile, saves companies money, augments DevOps goals, and increases customer satisfaction. This session is also called DevOps ICU: Improving DevOps Results by Integrating UX Practitioners and Processes when for a DevOps audience.

Agile teams and organizations need to focus on so much more than their software development methodology, flavor of Agile, or measurements of agility. If we’re not building what is valuable to and desired by customers, who cares if estimations were accurate, productivity was good, and efficiency was glorious? This is where UX specialists shine and are valuable investments. Debbie Levitt’s stories of being a 20+ year UX specialist in a Fortune 500 that misunderstood, belittled, circumvented, and overruled User Experience specialists will have you laughing, cringing, and wondering if these disasters are happening in your organization… and if your DevOps are in the intensive care unit.

No other role at your company spends time and effort evangelizing themselves. Developers aren’t making PowerPoints to explain to execs why it’s important to hire specialized, trained developers. QA isn’t holding meetings to ask for enough time to cycle through their complete and important process. It’s just us and it’s making us look weird and whiny. More importantly, it’s rarely working. This session will examine the pitfalls of evangelism and what actions we can take instead. We’ll be focusing on who and how many UX experts we should hire, the role of UX managers and leadership, processes, workflows, tools, and improving collaboration between UX and our cross-functional teammates. We’ll also learn how to measure the positive effects correctly integrating UX practitioners and processes has on DevOps.