…To Just Shipping It
The Agony
8 months or so ago, our team had come to a tipping point (product wise) where no matter what we did, it was just regression. I’m not sure if regression is the proper word to describe it now, but we had built a software: which took us 3 years to build it, but it was lethargic, it was bombarded with features, there was no fluidity in the product and the team. It lacked conviction. We lacked conviction.
The only thought that came to all of us (before the tipping point) was that “We did what everyone wanted. Our clients wanted these features. We have all the features. Seriously, we did have all the features! But we didn’t sell. We didn’t sell jack” Damn!
What we didn’t do at the time when we were building this product was questioning ourselves, “Do we really need this feature in our product right?”, “Is this the need of the hour?”, “Will the product sell even if we didn’t have this utility?”. No! Nada. We didn’t do any of that.And while we didn’t do any of that we also didn’t cover for the technical aspects of the product and in the end it all became so jumbled up that even the developers were scared to makes changes to anything in the code, because a change at one place in the system affected another which was not even discovered yet. What we did do was listen to whatever came from the client and put that in our product.
As I said earlier, we lacked conviction, we lacked objectivity, we lacked direction, we lacked a lot of other things too. We just lacked generally. I lacked. Our product didn’t sell, didn’t earn nothing.
In Eric Ries’ words “Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product”
Fast forward now to the tipping point, my manager and us (few of them) usually ended up conversing about what can we do with the product, now that it’s in such a critical condition and one day we just thought “Why don’t we build this again?”. That sounded like music to my ears and I’m sure it resonated the same way with everyone sitting there.
Of course, building a product again (which was not selling in the first place) would be a big risk and it would be an even bigger risk to get an approval from the top management. But my manager (Now the Product owner) sold it. Not that my manager was Gandalf the great, who with this wizard stick would roll it around and make a better product. What he knew, and what he instilled upon us was that with the right direction, with the right requirements and with enough clarity, we would be able to accomplish in building the product again, only this time to make it better.
The Ecstasy
But to know what needs to be done, you really need to know what needs to be done. We needed to read. Read about process management, need to read about UI/UX, and was there really a foolproof process to build a great product? Enter Shipping Greatness.
This book gave me and US the cornerstone/foundation to building our product from scratch *again* and to build it better this time. Of course we couldn’t do everything to the T that this book had said, but what it did give us was an idea to do things the right way. By questioning things, by validating assumptions. We got to a point that we charred down our Phase 1 requirements for the next 7 months, with one goal in mind “Not only we need to make this product better, but only keep what’s required”
What we did in the next 7 months was:
· Gather requirements
· Streamline internal working processes
· Divide teams into smaller groups (These teams included Dev, QA and BA)
· Build wireframes for clarity
· Detailed requirements
· Extensive review on requirements.
· Built a better UI. Intuitive UI and UX
· Switched to a favorable Database. MongoDB
· Used Bootstrap and AngularJS for our UI components
· Scrum environment
· Got habituated to Reading
· Increased Team Bonding
· Create a better work culture
· Had lots of chocolates and cakes.
Well, the last point did not help much in building a better product. What we realized was that we started to like the work that we were doing which wasn’t only forlorn dream for us before that. We cultivated a culture. A good culture.
However, I would absolutely be dishonest with myself if I said it was all smooth sailing in the past 7 months, it was not! There were fights, there were quibbles, there were pain points, there were issues we never came across, tonnes of them. We pushed the release date by a couple of weeks so as to accommodate things, we felt let down at times (mostly me)but we tackled one devil at a time.
And yeah, we didn’t have the solution to all of our issues, so we didn’t bother racking our brains on it and just put the question across to others (outside our team). We got answers. Everyone liked the idea that we were coming across teams to ask for solutions.
Once our beta version was developed, we personally made it a point to demo it to people within the company who had and had not an idea about our product. We got a lot of feedback about the product, which was good because we wanted an external view of our new product. Another thing learnt. Check.
We got a positive response. We felt good. The team felt good.
And finally, with all the work done, we had our release this February.
Leap year, yay!
The next day the CEO of our company congratulated us, and gave us 2 more cakes to eat. More Cakes! FTW
Our team was congratulated overall by everyone top and bottom in the company, not only because we delivered it on time, but because we delivered a better product.
Sales and Marketing were really feeling good about the whole product and they knew, now they have a product that they can sell. And they sold. People from different organizations were interested in our product when they heard about it. This felt really good.
We’re now in pursuit on taking our product to the next level, of course by following the same process that we performed earlier, because if a process is a success then it should be replicated.
So yes, we had a Ship which decayed after a while we built. And then we broke it down and built it piece by piece. So was it a Ship of Theseus…
