In school you are taught to produce a perfect result. You do it in phases. You take your time. You deal with minor constraints. You may work without clients.
To "succeed" in industry environments you have to re-learn and un-learn the ways you have been trained in your education.
Agencies and in-house company teams in the industry operate in completely different ways:
Their processes are non-linear.
They do UX and development work in parallel.
They collaborate across different functions.
They don't gather all of the requirements up front.
They change plans as they work.
They operate in uncertainty.
They ship products iteratively.
Changing Your Mindset
You have to develop an Agile mindset to succeed in the industry.
When you learn Agile, your ways of working will change.
As a UX researcher, UX designer, product person, project management person, or developer, you will be expected to change the way you work.
Your mindset will shift in how you should be bringing yourself to teams.
Your perspective will grow and change over time.
Companies may expect employees to already have experience working in Agile. You will likely be asked to speak to your Agile philosophies when interviewing.
It's crucial to build your Agile mindset in UX, product, and development fields.
Tech Fleet can help. We are an Agile Coaching organization, and all of the community work embeds Agile in its day-to-day processes.
TL;DR: What's Agile? Why Should I Care?
Agile is a philosophy and a way of approaching UX work.
Agile teams deliver incremental value as they go.
They do not work in sequential order or phases. They deliver small chunks of usable, valuable functionality to users continuously instead of delivering the full result all at once.
This picture that shows the "incremental value" of Agile vs. the "all-at-once value" delivered in Waterfall:
Waterfall teams (AKA the way you have probably been trained) build nothing but the car they agreed to in the beginning. They build the parts in sequential order. They put the entire car together before they deliver to users or clients. No one sees anything being built until it's launched. No one validates their direction while they are building.
Agile teams take the opposite approach. Instead of building a car in parts, Agile teams build usable things they can test along the way. They deliver value to users in chunks that increasingly solves more problems.
Incremental Value with Agile
Agile delivers value throughout a project, while Waterfall delivers value at the end of a project:
