© Abigael Donahue 2026

Agile methodology for

enterprise software UX design


Role: Agile practitioner & leader


Problem: The UX Design team lacked oversight of their enterprise software design work. The absence of a unified, consistent approach to project management led to bandwidth limitations, unclear strategic impact, and ambiguous prioritization.


Solution: I led my UX Design team’s adoption of agile. Under my leadership, the team adopted an agile approach for their enterprise software UX design work, leveraging Jira and working in 3-week sprints. 


Outcome: I positioned the UX Design team to establish a sustainable design pace, strategic focus, and data-driven prioritization.

Agile roll-out

4 months prior

  • In collaboration with our team’s Design Team Lead and Architect, I led an effort to define and document our UX design process. This process covered how we approach our work:

- Determine priorities with stakeholders

- Collect data & conduct competitive analysis

- Identify use cases

- Create journey maps, surface UX gaps, identify design solutions

- Design: Prototype, share & test, iterate, repeat

  • - Implement

  • I ran a design process pilot, where designers followed the design process in their everyday work and shared their feedback to inform iterations. The process was communicated to designers regularly while it was in progress and when it was finalized, which allowed for gradual adoption before implementation. 

1 month prior

  • I delivered a presentation to the team about agile methodology and how we plan to adopt an agile design process. 

  • This introduced the team to our upcoming agile ceremonies and Jira expectations, including tracking epics and stories, linking work to the strategic level, categorizing design work with activity types, and scoping design work with t-shirt sizes and activity points.

2 weeks prior

  • In addition to the presentation deck, I created materials for the team to communicate key agile concepts and Jira requirements in an easy-to-understand manner. 

  • I shared these resources and released a series of Slack announcements to promote our upcoming sprint planning. I also circulated the materials across other UX groups to help our department kick off agile and establish consistency in our onboarding approach.

Sprint kick-off

  • I led our first sprint planning session with the team. 

  • Working out of a Jira backlog and sprint board, I guided each designer to identify which Jira stories they feel they can prioritize in a 3-week window, paying close attention to story points. 

  • After the session, I audited all Jira stories in the sprint and contacted the owners with feedback on any needed revisions to align with agile requirements.

First sprint metrics

62

Stories in the sprint

95%

  • Stories with story points

95%

  • Stories with activity types

100%

  1. email@domain.com

  3. — Twitter
  4. — Instagram
  5. — Facebook


71%

Stories linked to epics

32%

  • Epics with parent links

84%

  • Stories kept up to date

100%

  1. email@domain.com

  3. — Twitter
  4. — Instagram
  5. — Facebook