From strategy to execution

Today I want to share a little about our development process and big rocks for 2016.

The first thing Martin (our CTO) and I did last October was to start planning our roadmap for 2016, and here’s what we came up with:

Recommendations. Understand users viewing patterns to provide personalized video recommendations.
Live Streaming. Create a platform that enables great entrepreneurs to broadcast live events, bringing value to the community in real time.
Mobile. Today, nearly a third of all content is consumed from mobile devices. We will maximize this experience through an amazing App.
Platform Refinement. Improve user experience on content consumption through a simpler and easier interface.
Analytics. Our content creators deserve KPIs that can help them improve their content and engage with their audience.
Content Discovery. Educating is about interacting and giving the right content to the right people.
Growth. Suggest great content to users. Directly in their inbox.
Social. What’s important to you might also be important to your friends. Share your notes and highlighted content.
Networking/Mentorship. People you want to know may be closer than you think. We will help you to find them on HandsOn.

As you can see, we chose the main areas we want to focus our development efforts on, and also a few features we would like to see implemented this year.

Sharing with the team

Once we had an initial list, it was time to share it with our team and gather some feedback and ideas. After a couple months of discussions and detailing features, we had a pretty good agenda to start the year. We just had to arrange the priorities.

A constant learning process

Our process is fairly lightweight and simple: we use Trello boards to keep track of all features. Everything starts at the “requested” list. Once we decide on something we want to do, the card containing the task gets moved to the “to do” list, which is nothing more than a section containing the priorities of everything we want to do on our platform.

We organize our schedule by 2 weeks long sprints, meaning that every two weeks we stop and look at our “to do” list, make sure everything there still makes sense, and move all we want to do in the next 15 days to the “sprint” list. From there, during the sprint, it’s a simple flow of “doing” and “done”.

Also during the sprint, every time we have enough features and fixes ready, we deploy to the environment and let our test users know of the changes, so they can start testing. Once all features in the sprint are done or the two week sprint time is reached, we deploy everything to test one last time and allow our users 3 to 4 days of testing while we start working on the next sprint. Once everything is done, a new build is pushed to production. That’s how we keep improving and innovating our platform every day!

The goal behind these posts is to share with you a glance of our vision, strategy, and challenges, hopefully helping you with a few of your own problems.

#HandsOn

P.S.: We are passionate about bringing value and helping you to achieve your goals. Share your thoughts about our platform and the content you’re consuming.