How do teams share their understanding on the common goals? It is either audio or visual. Recording each talk and storing them (tagged) is not the most effective way to share common knowledge. Sketching is not new to agile teams. We are taking it a step forward in the form of Vision Boards. Vision Board – is creative visualization of your goals. While our focus in this talk remains on how teams could use vision boards, individuals will also be able to use these boards in order to help transform their life goals into reality. There are pictures or sketches of what they want – all pasted together on one board – so they constantly remind themselves of their ultimate goals in the bigger scheme of things. These goals may not be achievable with one task. They may need a series of tasks which do not directly seem to be connected with the goal. But these visualizations captured – are very good indicators of what success means to one.
We used Vision Boards to visualize our customer experience, their reactions and expected patterns of use for our application. This board single handedly kept all our teams aligned and as many changes happened – the teams knew their true north when they were discussing how to design the screens and which features to build on (priority). Our already agile teams were constantly looking at the short term goals of prioritized features, but vision board helped them reduce chaos and clutter and saved lot of time on understanding the overall requirement – it also served as the basis for User Stories.