My toolbox as a product guy

As a product guy for the past 8 years (3 in freelance), I had the chance to assist a dozen of startups. I want to present the tools I like and how I use them to share my experience and point of view and open a discussion.

This first article deals with User Story specifications and roadmap description. 2 other articles will cover prototyping then monitoring and optimisation of KPI.

1 — how to built an Agile product roadmap

Trello: the keystone of a tech project

When you start a new project, either a new venture or a small side project, Trello.com is my go-to-solution to define and keep track of advancement. I tried a couple of other project management tool like Asana, Basecamp or Jira but none of them is able to adapt to each project and each step of the project lifetime.

The main advantage of Trello lies in its flexibility: when you start a blank board every type of organisation is possible. The tool fits with tech, design and marketing team and it’s a super important point for me as a Product Owner. It’s not perfect as a tickets management solution to track bug fixing, so you might encounter tech guys that prefer old services like Jira.

Depending on the project advancement, you might want to use Trello in an Agile mode, one column per sprint if the project is new and not yet released. Or if the project is live, in a Kanban way with columns like to do, doing, done, to release.

My template for tech side board is available : here

I use this kind of boards whenever I start a new project. A few months ago, I was introduced to test driven development by a senior developer I was working with, I must say that there is a lot to learn from it. I’m trying to write every feature thinking of the way I will test it. It helps me identify and foresee boundary conditions.

Must have plugin for Trello: Scrum for Trello & Slack integration

I also use plugins for Trello for 2 purposes :

• to estimate task / user story difficulty with scrum for Trello

Estimation is a key step in all Agile process. It helps tech and product team anticipate how many User Stories can be completed during a sprint and helps to assess the whole process. If estimations are off, it’s a sign that user story description or communication during sprint planning aren’t good enough.

Difficulty of an user story is estimated using Fibonacci sequence, in order to ease estimation process. It’s easier to feel the gap between 5 and 8 or 13 and 21 than 8 and 9 or 9 and 10. Indeed, Difficulty regroups notions like research and tests needed to complete the task, or task strongly connected with a lot of other features. Once the task is done, it’s all important that the team fills consumed points. The objective is to provide you with a clear vision of how time was spent on the project : coding new features, debug former ones, release new version, code refactoring, etc.

• to ease communication and keep the boards up to date

The second add-on is the integration between slack and trello.

The main purpose of this tool is to ease board updates. Being able to integrate new card in a Trello board directly in Slack (where topic, need and feature often arise). It’s super convient to use and very useful.

Conclusion

Here is a first sneak peek of how I use tools to set up tech project. This way we are able to centralize informations and vision. It helps the project to keep track of the advancement. In the coming weeks, I’ll add 2 articles to discuss 2 topics in which product management is involve :

• design: prototyping and graphic assets management : how to communicate user experience vision with design and tech team.
• Analytics, CRM and growth hacking: what to mesure and what to do with data