Antennas up. Receive and send.

Simon Wilson
Jan 13, 2018 · 2 min read

You’re in an agile team. You’ve a product owner, a delivery manager, a user researcher, a content designer, an interaction designer, a front-end dev, a sort of full stack dev, the back-end dev. Usually there’s a few more back-end devs than just the one. You’re all focused on delivering a product, a service, some thing.

But you’re a team within a wider organisation. A small business. A bigger business. A government department. How do you make sure you’re making some thing consistent with what most, if not every, other team is?

Throughout the sprint you will have no doubt benefited from the sharing of other teams.

Put your antenna up.

You listen for signals coming in, sure. And you’ve probably benfited from them, be it code from elsewhere to design patterns. But just as important: Make sure you send signals out.

Usually being an agile team means you work in cycles, in sprints. As you close a sprint give yourself, give your team time to look wider. What can they share? What have they learnt? What are they unsure about? What came in that was useful? What came in they have questioned? What is new they have discovered?What are they sure about?

It’s about flow, it’s about balance. Don’t be about one way traffic. Don’t always be receiving. Make sure you send out too. Find the time, ensure the time is there for you to transmit out. Usually all it takes is an hour a cycle to put out to those around your team.

And if you’re a product owner, take the onus, lead by example, make sharing a thing you value and your team does. Give them the time to do this, a task every sprint, even a sprint goal. Those antennas are already up. Send as many signals out as you receive. Give as much as you take. Somewhere, sometime another team will benefit the way you did when you started receiving.

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Simon Wilson

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Currently: do design stuff at DWP Digital. Previously: director/head of in agency land, lead interaction designer at HMRC, lead designer on #NHSbeta.