A Flamingo Product Development Journey

The last half year I have been working on a project called ‘Flamingo’. This is a kind of fun project code we use as long as the actual product name is not yet chosen.

This really helps internal communication to make sure everyone knows what your talking about and you are on the same page.

First 4–5 months: looking for the right fish

The first few months of my flamingo project consisted of scoping, budgeting, getting the right resources in with the purpose of creating a proposal for management. Then redrafting the proposal to see if we can adjust scope, budget and may be show ‘something’. That something is an initial impression of what the product may look look. For creating that first impression I worked closely with UX to give a basic set of screenshots.

Based on the adjusted proposal, the MT team agreed on scope, budget and the assignment of resources. This cycle of redrafting proposal, budget and scope took about 4 months in total.

The scope entailed 7 separate projects within the overall Flamingo program: Practical Insights, Document and Guides, Quick Answers, Arbitrator Profiles, homepage for Flamingo customers, new homepage for non Flamingo customers and Comparison tools.

Since the group I am working for is small, my role was multiple: program manager, project team lead, UX tester, product manager and business analyst.

The team I worked with consisted of a product manager, a UX designer, 2 content managers, sales and marketing as well as a technical team and QA team. In total I was managing about 15 stakeholders in total. It turned out a great collaboration. Everyone was really motivated in contributing to our end goal.

Key learnings

- Make sure that all stakeholders agree on scope at least 3 months prior to launch (for us it was 2 and that turned out to be challenging)

- Start on time with deciding on the right business and price model (we started 3 months before launch and turned out to be too short)

- Align content with UX on time: what is designed always has an impact on the content workflows (we discovered too late in the process that content workflows had to be changed and that we had to get the backend right after launch)

- Always keep space for unexpected costs in your budget: development or QA may run over in hours due to additional requests or the number of times

- Create dashboards with project flows to report to the project team

- Create reports with numbers to report to MT.

One week before launch: can we fly?

My Flamingo has started its flight 1 week prior to release… The last 3 weeks consisted of testing, fixing cycles.

BUT we had a Go to move out of Development onto Test

What have we learnt up till now?

1. Make sure you have a thoroughly experienced QA and development team
2. Prevent getting swamped in the number of defects. So Prioritize, Prioritize |
3. Keep all stakeholders informed by creating reports on
3.1. Progress vs KPIs per track or feature
3.2. Identify Risks and provide mitigations for each
3.3. Give a look forward on what you will do until the next update

4. Decide on the GO involving all stakeholders ( usually when no critical and high level showstoppers are left)

Launch time?

A week later me and my team are flying to launch in just 3 days. A little later than expected.

Why?

Because even though development and testing may give a GO. It does not mean the Go to Market has one too…

But this is beneficial to QA and development too: you can tidy up, add a bit of extra features which are next on the schedule.

Key learnings:
1. ensure that everyone is on the same page on the chosen business model
2. ensure the price model covers all possible markets and customer segments
3. plan training of key stakeholders on time
4. don’t choose a launch date when it is a national holiday day 😉

In full flight

A week later my Flamingo is flying!

We have launched and it is called KluwerArbitration Practice Plus!

Thanks to Vincent Verschoor, Lia Nouwen, Eleanor Taylor, Henk Barkema , Ewa Cairns-Szkatuła, Anthony Davies our great vendor team: Tina Kos, Louis de Gijsel, Wendy Dimmendaal and Daniël Hadzic for a great collaboration!