Blog
How will UX and Design thinking influence how executives fund product development in the future?
Most product ideas shouldn't be built. Somewhere between 60% and 90% of what ends up in a backlog won't actually deliver value — but most organizations only discover that after they've already sunk time and money into the build. Lean UX, design thinking, and cheap experiments offer a way to find out much earlier, which is why the real wave in agility today isn't about faster delivery at all. It's about discovery.
"How do we balance UX with shipping fast in Scrum?" is the wrong question. The real goal isn't to ship faster — it's to discover faster, because a large chunk of the ideas in your backlog probably shouldn't be built at all. Here's how Scrum and UX actually fit together, from striped vs. blended backlogs to the Lean UX Canvas, and why the combination closes the fundamental gap that Lean Startup left open.
Why adding Lean UX to Scrum with Kanban is integral to the future of agile?
Scrum with Kanban already gives teams a serious edge in delivering value on a steady cadence — but how do you know you're delivering the right things? That's where Lean UX comes in. With two-thirds of product features rarely or never used (according to the Standish Group's CHAOS report), the cost of building the wrong thing is staggering. This piece explores how layering Lean UX techniques onto Scrum with Kanban helps teams discover unmet customer needs, test risky assumptions, and avoid building products nobody wants. A walkthrough of the Lean UX canvas — from framing the business problem to identifying the assumption that could sink everything — shows how humility, experimentation, and data-informed decisions create both better products and more rewarding work.