Jeff Gothelf on Lean UX in an Agency World

After listening to my interview with UX Immersion speaker, Jeff Gothelf, Ziv posed this this question:

I was wondering about the viability of integrating this methodology into a design agency that basically ends it’s work with a recommendations document with no real access to the development teams. It sounds like major shifts in people’s understanding of the process are needed to accommodate that.

I sent the question off to Jeff, who supplied this awesome answer:

In an agency context, especially with existing clients, making Lean UX work requires the proper expectation setting up front. From the beginning of the engagement, even before the pitch, start setting the expectation with you client that this engagement will be different. There will be frequent check-ins, reviews, requests for access to customers and no clear, defined scope at the beginning of the engagement. Instead, establish a time box (a period of time for which the agency will be engaged) and agree on a problem statement the agency is being hired to solve. The other key thing to articulate and agree upon with your client is how you will measure success. What metrics will you use to determine that you’ve built the right solution to the problem statement? Once that is agreed upon, the iterative Lean UX process can begin. As you iterate note how your design hypotheses are measuring up against your goals.

At the end of the time box the client gets the best possible solution your team could come up with in that time frame. It will be a better solution than the one you would have scoped out in the traditional up-front heavy planning approach because you will be several iterations into it and have some level of validation to your designs.

What do you think?