Episode Four, Process Management
Or “The Time I Used Trello”
So we’ve got a design brief. We’ve got a process. We’ve got a basic understanding of the market. Now what?
Well, first off, I met with the partners to get out of my head and into some constructive crit.
The first thing we spoke about is the fact that I’m burning up hours on this. This is a completely valid point (I go through about 17 drafts just to get a Medium post out, but that’s impostor syndrome for you). To help me get a better feel for rhythm, we worked out what an MVP-level version of the site might look like, and allocated a budget to it.
Working at one full-time equivalent (7.5 hours/day) over the course of three weeks (15 days) gives us a budget of 112.5 “person-hours”, spread around the team, to push out a V1 site. We want to continue iterating on that afterwards, in two-week sprints.
Break it Down
Next we spent a bit of time breaking the work down into tasks, and assigning “shirt sizes”— relative estimates of small, medium or large—to each.
We ended up estimating five (and a half) days over budget. Having said that, a lot of that S-level work won’t actually take a quarter of a day, but we chose that as the smallest unit of time for this exercise.
These estimates should help me timebox my efforts and get away from my usual “work on it until it’s ready” approach. Also, if something ends up being way off, we know to tweak our estimate for next time.
I reproduced the whole thing in Trello as a project backlog. It’s rewarding to see cards dance across the board, even if it means a bit more maintenance work actually moving them. It’s also hooked up to Slack to provide a feed of updates, and Toggl so I can track time directly against a card (if I don’t forget, that is).
Get Crispy
If you’ve never read Amy Hoy’s Just F#*!ing Ship, you probably should. It’s an easy to understand guide to autodidactic project management (although I’m sure she wouldn’t think of it that way). There’s some great advice for laying out your plans in a really specific manner so you are then free to execute on things. In my case it meant breaking down those Trello cards even further.
I found this particularly useful for the writing-based work, as it’s really easy for me to get lost in my own thoughts. Professional copywriters, I envy you.
In the only graphic design class I took at university, I was introduced to the “100 thumbnail sketches” approach—essentially, keep churning out ideas until you’re forced to be really creative to avoid repeating yourself. This seems to mirror the “50 tags” approach seen on hit TV show Mad Men.
So, I wrote a bunch of tags—promptly dismissing half of them as utter garbage and striking out a further quarter as not good enough.
Baby steps, OK?
None of these are amazing, but they’re a step in the right direction, especially after getting some external feedback. We can talk about what’s missing or what’s extraneous, rather than trying to create a winner from scratch.
Hello, Github
Now that the content side of things is starting to come along nicely, we can flip over and start to work on the dev environment. This is not my domain at all, but I did get to set up the Git repository. Yay.
So there you have it. Structure, gameplan, progress. Tune in next time to see the visual treatment start to take form.
