Agile Meets Design Thinking by University of Virginia (Coursera)
A combination of Agile and Design Thinking can provide a very different and effective approach to product development. This Course developed at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business teaches how to use agile product development and design thinking to offer valuable solutions to meaningful problems and create better digital products.
In this course, students learn how to determine what’s valuable to a user early in the process, focus most energy and time on testable narratives about the user and create a strong shared perspective. There are four modules in the course that discuss following topics:
- Overview of Agile practices and the problems agile solves
- Developing personas, problem scenarios, and alternatives using best practices from design thinking
- User research
- Creating agile user stories
- Testing assumptions
- Focusing on Customer Value with User Stories
This course is best suited for those who are using agile methods and have some experience working in the digital space. It is a part of following two specializations on Coursera:
- Digital Product Management Specialization
- Agile Development Specialization
The course is taught by Alex Cowan, who has been an entrepreneur and intrapreneur. He is currently teaching at UVA Darden and coaching product teams. His area of expertise is digital innovation.
Key Highlights
- Agile and Design Thinking Course endorsed by Project Management Institute (PMI)
- Learn to evaluate and explain the relevance of concepts and practices from the agile development methodologies
- Learn to use design methods like personas and problem scenarios
- Understand how to facilitate narrative collaboration with user stories and prototypes
- Learn how to diagnose what software will be valuable to the user and how to test your ideas using agile user stories and prototypes
Duration : 4 weeks, 2-5 hours per week
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