American International Group
Measuring Design Inside AIG's Agile Process
The Agile process behind PCG and Hinge: how a new XD team got work done inside a company-wide framework.
Agile training was mandatory across AIG, and the new XD team certified in it to work with other groups. I led project and sprint-level work inside it, and the sprint data is where Hinge's measured results came from.
Agile was built for software teams, so the work was finding how design could use it effectively. It is how PCG was delivered in six months, with design and testing in every sprint, and how Hinge released in increments from MVP to version 2.0. Every group worked the same way, so we could monitor work, and Hinge's usage, company-wide.
Agile Story Writing
Rather than listing tasks for each person, we wrote user stories so every team member knew what they were doing and why. That gave each person a view of the larger project, however small their task.
Agile Estimation & Story Sizing
Sizing stories as a team showed everyone how their work related to everyone else’s, and each story’s complexity was scored on a Fibonacci scale. Because we also tracked how long tasks actually took, we could use that history to forecast time and cost at the team, group, or organizational level. Over time, as velocity data accumulated, new features were forecasted with increasing confidence.
Agile Sprints
Every sprint was the same length, which made velocity comparable from one sprint to the next. Each began with brief planning and ended with a retrospective. Design and usability testing happened inside the sprint alongside development, and because the team shipped in small increments rather than one large release, real solutions reached customers one piece at a time, sooner.
Agile Tooling
The tools changed as the company adapted to each org's needs, JIRA and Agile Central among them, so the practice mattered more than any one product. Design shared boards with engineering on some projects and not on others. Cost and efficiency reporting went mainly to operations and product managers.
Conclusion: A Process That Measured the Work
Agile only pays off when it is implemented properly, and the barrier to entry is real: training, and teams across disciplines working from the same principles. At AIG the effort paid off in the measured results behind Hinge.