Facing a group of UX (user experience) people at one of our frequent events at benext. I’m doing my best to give perspective to this role, I launch into a “possible history of agility.”

I write this with a smile: 1999, XP (extreme programming) was born. A few books by Kent Beck bloom on tables. Some dive in. 2003, the brutal shock of the crisis puts much of this away in closets, and the extreme side of communication finishes putting it in the shadows. 2005 or 2006, a small booklet by Henrik Kniberg describes somewhat funny poker games among developers. It sparks interest. In 2008 a new economic crisis emerges. It’s the end of CMMi and the like, big clunky has been stuff. The US (ahead of us) throws themselves wholeheartedly into this approach that resembles them (SCRUM) (then return of XP under software craftsmanship and Kanban).

In France it trembles severely from 2010 to 2013. 2013 is the year when all the large groups dive in. And when questions of agile at scale emerge here.

And UX? Since that’s my current conversation, at what point does the term spread? 2015 I’m told. Its employability explodes in 2018. And why this simmering battle with POs (product owner)? My reading? Here it is. It’s worth what it’s worth. It’s rather pessimistic in the short term. In the long term, I remain optimistic.

From 2010 to 2015 agile is SCRUM. SCRUM is first the coach and the scrummaster in the organizations’ imagination. But as the years pass and the majority of companies refuse to really commit to it, to really embrace the culture and approach, it will push them to change interlocutors. The scrummaster and even more so the coach are often too inconvenient in the sense that they directly impact the heart of the system: its organization, its power games, decision-making. They then often empty these roles of meaning by making them figureheads or tokens in many cases (not everywhere, rest assured). Facilitators, but certainly not agile coaches: coaches can be facilitators. By adding the word agile you add convictions, a way of seeing the world, a school, an approach more operational than a coaching school (that’s not the debate).

No one is fooled, not the company itself naturally, which will try to appropriate agility (which it keenly feels it needs) with a role less at the heart of the company, that of product owner. Less at the heart? Yes. The product it manufactures, it distributes. It doesn’t govern its culture or its decision-making. And then agile coaches and scrummasters have the annoying habit of not doing but being and supporting. The product owner does. Very different temporality, much more classic cause and effect system.

The new agility is no longer the agile coach or the scrummaster, it’s the product owner. And then this one can be mixed into all our sauces. He takes care of the product. But here too, drive out nature and it returns at a gallop. In most structures, the product owner becomes the person responsible for the development of the product (ouch). And since often the product is a project. He becomes responsible for the development of the project. You see where I’m going?

2015-2018 is the golden age of employability for product owner and product manager. But people are good. They struggle not to be crushed by the company. They defend tooth and nail the product owner who is not a boss, but who has his eyes riveted on his product, tactics, strategy, facilitation around him and his users and his makers. The product is not the heart of the company (yes it creates tension to read this), but product owners are still too central with their claim on value. The company must push these desires further away. Restore order.

2019-2020, that’s when the success of UX employability explodes (user experience, before we called them ergonomists if that helps you). They are more on the periphery. They don’t really decide, they are like product owners with less claims, they know how to read users. Today in fact we’re putting them in competition with product owners, the term product design is starting to spread. When I ask people about the difference, the only sensible answer that emerges is: an understanding of users’ cognitive mechanisms and therefore better integrating them. For the rest it’s what product owners, scrummasters and agile coaches did before. And others before them. Design Thinking, Lean startup and their ancestors. Now there’s even Lean UX. Kamoulox¹.

Since they’re more on the periphery, the rest of the company doesn’t need to change, to question itself. So we favor them. Oddly, since their success product owners have regained a certain freedom, and with it, a certain meaning.

UX are very good. It’s to those at benext that I’m speaking when I approach this possible history of agility. With perspective, it’s mainly the movement to expel outward what would come to disrupt the organization’s habits that strikes me throughout these years.

And tomorrow then? Naturally predictions only bind the credulous. Data that will allow us to remove all human and therefore inconvenient decisions?