The Switch
At Prodio, we have quarterly goals of lifting our development process up to next level based on pre-defined roadmap. That roadmap is not very clear, but pretty good in it’s approximation, and by the time we arrive there, we’re clear.
I call this The Switch. Once it is down, the inevitable consequence of it follow for the whole organisation. We fondly and regularly flip this switch. A new one is coming.
Recently chanced upon an article on Netflix Techblog and ended up overlapping it with out thought process to see if we’re in right direction. Seems we’re. So this is a little comparison of what we do that they do followed by what we intend to do next.
Where we are similar: We have teams dedicated around products and see their work as building and delivering products.
The portion of this philosophy that we need to cover next are:
- The developers must participate in product definition and design process
They must be able to place the value of Epic-Feature-Requirement relationship and why a particular requirement is prioritised for delivery currently. For a given requirement they should be able to define the persona and user journey and list the value expected off that journey. They must be able to link this to UX patterns and choose a given UX pattern to achieve the objective. They must be able to check the UX/UI for logicality/Consistency/Contradiction test and should be able to write all test cases comprehensively to reduce future iterations.
- The developers must participate in architecting process
The developers should be able to evaluate for a given new requirement the relationship with the underlying data model and architecture diagram and introduce definitions & test cases for backend required and check for impact.
- The developers must be able to anticipate disruptions and look out pre-emptively
Library upgrades, OS upgrades, appstore policy changes, third party integrations bringing changes etc must be converted into a tangible framework for staying on top of potential changes
Where Netflix has created ‘centralized teams’ , our idea is to create an ‘engineering’ team. This team takes care of:
- Infrastructure architecting & management
- Monitoring
- Tools
- Design, architecture and patterns
- Feedback & training
The brief of this team is to prepare a visibility map for upcoming product developments and laser sharp focus on accumulation of any Tech Debt in our portfolio. We’re setting uptill June’19 to convert these into tangible measurable processes.
