Summary
Over the past few years, the digital team at AusPost has matured into one of the most well-functioning agile trains in Australia. The challenge in this journey to success was to ensure how design and discovery retain their customer centricity in an environment of rapid production. The need was to continue to be proactive instead of reactive in the approach to problem-solving. Some of the challenges were: To ensure there was enough room for the right amount of research for the right problem while ensuring rapid delivery. To ensure that all members of the team from Product to Development could collaborate like a true cross-functional team to come up with solutions to problems. To ensure the team established the right metrics that spoke to the experience. The talk will be a case study of how the Design team experimented with various methodologies to create more breathing room for design-led problem-solving in the agile train.
Key Insights
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Enterprises often rush to market following prescribed frameworks, sacrificing breathing room needed for thoughtful design.
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Australia Post’s massive scale and legacy systems create unique challenges for integrating agile and design practices.
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Early UX involvement in SAFE was minimal and isolated, resulting in visionary but undeliverable solutions.
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Rapid 'just in time' design improved tech collaboration but led to reactive, tech-heavy designs lacking customer focus.
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Design sprints provide dedicated thinking space and alignment but are insufficient for complex, multi-channel problems.
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Dual-track agile with parallel discovery and delivery creates necessary breathing room to unpack problems and deliver iteratively.
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Cross-functional collaboration involving product managers, designers, and architects is crucial to connect discovery and delivery.
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Quick wins like simple SEO fixes can reduce customer friction and buy time for more complex delivery.
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Establishing shared, validated success metrics early ensures research and delivery remain focused and measurable.
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Continuous improvement and flexibility trump rigid adherence to any single methodology in large enterprises.
Notable Quotes
"There’s no breathing room for design to conceive and execute a delightful solution in enterprises."
"SAFE is essentially a software development methodology, which makes integrating experience design challenging."
"We realized that beautiful visions without early tech collaboration were unrealistic to deliver."
"Quick experiments allowed us to fail fast, but without thinking space, we lacked proactive problem solving."
"Design sprints are great for small problems, but not appropriate for complex multi-channel issues."
"Discovery and delivery run parallel without time dependency, allowing continuous learning and incremental delivery."
"Having roles upstream and downstream connected ensures constant dialogue between discovery and delivery tracks."
"We uncovered that 30,000 customers were forced in-store because they couldn’t verify identity online."
"A framework is good as long as you allow a bit of push and pull into it."
"It’s never over. It’s a continuous process of improvement."
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