Rambling Notes on an Irony Only I Seem to Notice

As a newbie doing mobile planning, I heard gripes from some web-planning seniors. Why the irony of feeling those same gripes, now from the native generation? The wall of seniors who ordered me to fill in the "right" answers on a standard? frame (template) -- I've been running into that same wall in the digital natives lately. Only the contents inside the frame (template) have changed; in the end, a wall is a wall.

Some of those seniors -- the managers -- handed me down frames (templates, model answers) that they themselves had inherited from even earlier seniors. And they told me these were verified right answers. If I shared or proposed differences between mobile and web, I'd get things like "How dare you," "So disrespectful," or "You've got some attitude."
Some of the native generation have their own frames (templates, model answers). To them, the right answer is fame and recognition. More than my position or situation, the service category and positioning of our company, or even the persona (target), what matters more to them is a comparison with outputs from renowned companies and brands -- does Kakao do it this way? do Facebook or Instagram? does Coupang? And when I share HCI fundamentals or human psychology with them and propose a new interface, the question I get is: "Where did you work before?"
The seniors were emotional; the natives are cold and cynical.


For this reason, in SMEs and startups alike, recent keywords and study groups -- agile, user stories, data-driven -- are failing to root themselves in their own service, company, or environment.
It seems to be grounded in a kind of relative deprivation -- "renowned brands are doing it, so if we don't adopt it, aren't we falling behind?" -- and an anxiety about not belonging to the peer culture.
Some use it as a marketing term, others adopt it because they feel left behind.




#Professionally
Please... don't chase the template.
Don't just benchmark the outcome.

News is a temporary frame made so that the participants in a given situation understand the same thing and respond in the same direction. Whether you're designing information, drawing screens, on Notion or wherever, right now...

Please, let's stop benchmarking influencer and famous-brand outputs.


#Socially
In a fast-changing era, the youth, having watched so-called adults fail to behave like adults and stumble about confused,
began -- very slowly for some, quickly for others -- to either stop following adults, or to distrust them altogether.
They began to follow specific YouTube influencers instead.
It's the result of everyone going it alone in an age of anxiety.




#Occupationally (the main point)
Agile, user stories --
they weren't created to convey requirements more clearly. T_T

They were created to say, let's not define things too precisely.
They were created to say, let's have more conversations.

They're not really suited to use as evidence, history management, or tidy deliverables. If that's what you want, run it waterfall.

The spirit is "leave the medicine to the pharmacist."
Think about it.
If someone who isn't a development or design expert defines the solution before a product even gets going, then even if a better alternative exists, in the end the stale solution gets applied. Lucky case: an expert spots it later and proposes something, but since work has already been done, there'll be friction with multiple stakeholders. Isn't that exactly how reality plays out?

So the process built to "talk more often and revise more often while we make it" is agile. And the idea of improving it via user feedback is the funnel. And framing the funnel (phenomenon) that surfaces not as a solution (what) but as a story grounded in the user's pain points (needs, why) -- that's the user story.

You know this better than me, but they say user stories are to be written on cards. (Tools like Jira or Confluence, which digitize that, just call them "issues" or "tickets.")
Think about it -- how much content can you fit on a single card? From the start, it was meant to sketch out the task (problem, issue) briefly on one card, and bring everyone into the meeting.
And because the solutions that come out of that meeting (conversation) are inherently fuzzy, the field called "acceptance criteria" was created so that each person could freely prepare alternatives while sharing the minimum conditions. Right? It only stands to reason.

We're treating agile or user stories, and the issues/tickets/acceptance criteria written through them, as if they were single-answer templates (frames), as if they were deliverables to Ctrl-C/V.




For example, the air in the meeting room is stuffy. How do we fix it? Someone will say open the window, another will say crack the door a bit, another will say run the air purifier, another will say turn on the AC fan, another will say use AI mode. So which one's the right answer here?
Exactly. There isn't one. Here, situation and conditions are what matter. If a meeting is in progress, you can't leave the door open; if it's raining outside, you can't leave the window open. If there's no air purifier, you can't even try that; and even if there's an AC, an old model won't have AI.
That's why in agile, what gets said is "the air is stuffy -- how do we make it pleasant?" Rather than the planner, who doesn't and can't know everything, setting an answer and issuing orders! It's the people who know why everyone gathered, the people who know the weather outside, and the people who know each device's traits and condition, coming together to solve the problem. What's an unsolvable problem for someone might not be a problem at all for someone else.
And in the process of proposing alternatives, choosing one, and running with it, there should still be a minimum set of acceptance criteria, right? Like whether it's acceptable to spend additional money to fix the stuffy air, or whether it's okay to step out of the meeting room to check the weather.

..