Product Development on the Open Road
If you’ve ever endeavored a cross-country road trip, you’ve experienced the existential joy and agonizing pain that is an extended journey.
Sure, the destinations, both those along the way and the final one far off in the distance, are exciting, but the true meat of the experience is on the road itself.
It’s the too-fast-by-half truckers and too-slow-by-half minivans stretching your nerves and wits. The straight highways and twisty back roads (there are always plenty of those). By the end of a long day, you need a long soak in a natural hot spring.
Yeah, if you’ve enjoyed (endured?) a trip like this, you know what it’s like to plan and execute a new product development project.
Getting Your Project On the Road
Projects can start in a variety of ways, depending on your company structure and practices. But all projects share some basic qualities.
- They have a destination in mind.
- They have too few hours to get there.
- And they have more requirements (think of it like roadside attractions) than sense.
So be careful, and don’t get stuck purchasing the equivalent of $5 per gallon gas outside of Arches National Park. Plan wisely.
Any good product development project will be quickly fit into a measured, respected planning cycle that defines all of the rules of engagement. Rules such as requirements, stakeholders, deadlines, and budget.
Guess which is most important.
Okay, that was a trick question. They are all important, though sometimes one or more will trump the others.
To be fair, it’s hard to gather this information. You’ll be tempted to let things slide. But, just like driving aimlessly is often a bad idea, so is letting these rules of engagement go by the wayside.
At Helpful Human, we quickly resolve these items as religiously as we can. Most of the time we are working with clever partners and clients who can steer their own ships, and we are joining in along the way to help achieve an important goal. Often our highest calling is to bring our expertise into the equation as soon as we can, and we do that after we establish the budget, deadline, and stakeholders.
Requirements Exploration
Now, you might be scratching your head. Did we just put the cart before the horse? Typically, you might think, you wouldn’t establish the budget, deadline, and stakeholders until after you have measured out the requirements.
In most cases, yeah, that would be a goal. But, keep in mind that most product development projects start in various stages of the lifecycle.
Advanced: These are full-size teams with managers who have already been prescribing needs, months before your team has even reviewed a jot of the plan. Your role is to help execute.
Intermediate: Big milestones and items that the solution needs to accomplish have been identified. You’re needed to refine the vision and execute the plan.
Beginning: No clear goal has been defined, but a new product is required. This team (or individual) will need help at every stage.
Let’s focus on the last group. Products that start with your team heavily involved will likely come with only the budget, deadline, or stakeholders defined (you’re lucky if you get all three).
Requirements exploration will identify expectations, blindspots, goals, fears, hopes, and ultimately the elements needed to guide a project home. By the end of our exploration, you’ll know your destination, the stops along the way, and the reason you’re on this journey.
In our team, we build requirements in terms of user stories, the real world activities affecting task setting to come next. We say things like, “As a customer, I’d like to book my next vacation using details from my previous trips so that I can make sure to relive great memories.” Stories like this can grip a team and give them a foundation to build upon.
We build projects around these stories, using them to define the smaller chunks of work, the backlog of tasks. This backlog, and the stories they represent, informs the remainder of the project, and it helps keep us oriented to true north.
Scheduling Your Stops
Once the backlog of tasks is in place, we build a plan of measured deliverables, tight sprint scheduling, and regular reviews with clients. This is where we solidify the deadline, and how we get there. The deadline is mutually agreed upon by our team and the client. It’s set in stone, a constant reminder of what we’ve agreed upon.
Sprint planning using a two-week release schedule keeps us focused on the big goal, while breaking down the work into deliverable chunks.
Sprints help us achieve those rest stops in our projects. Sprints end in releases, and these releases are designed with the express goal of delivering real-time business value. Think of it as a waypoint with hotels and fantastic restaurants. Aim for that.
Keep a journal
Each step of the journey is chronicled in real-time in our project management tool of choice, Trello. This Kanban-style productivity tool uses boards and laterally moving streams to help visually, and practically, guide a project from start to finish. We use Trello to document our plan, track the progress, and to make reflective notes we can use to inspire more work in the future.
Stay in touch with your caravan
In the product development cycle, weekly meetings and daily stand-up meetings come in really handy. Communicating amongst teams and clients is about keeping everyone in sync and on track.
Much of the communication that happens using tools like Slack, Trello, and email all becomes less personal as time passes. It helps to engage face-to-face or via video calls whenever possible.
Weekly calls with clients are usually less than 30 minutes and are entirely focused on highlighting work that immediately affects the client. Daily stand-ups are amongst your team, and these center on identifying tasks, blockers and any updates not yet in Trello. Communication is the key to any good relationship. As our fearless leader, Mark Sandeno says:
“A relationship without communication is dead.”
Completing the journey
Of course, your projects are more complicated than road trips; but, just like those trips, if you can stick to a process, all will go well, and everyone will come out on the other side with a positive experience — and perhaps something to show for their efforts.
We’ll be exploring more of these management techniques and processes in much more depth in future posts. Stay tuned and subscribe to hear from us whenever we post or check out our website to learn more about what we do at Helpful Human.
