Hold tight! Five weeks from inception to launch
The last five weeks have been an exciting rollercoaster with many twists, turns and bumps along the way, as we set out to implement new search functionality for Service Recipes, a platform that collects practical examples to help charities reuse and learn from one another’s digital services.
Perfect timing
When Thoughtworks reached out to us at the end of March offering some short-term pro bono development support, the timing couldn’t have been better! We’d just concluded some user testing and one of the top priorities that emerged was the need for search functionality on the recipes platform. It’s been a whirlwind five weeks where I’ve learnt a great deal, about myself and about working at pace with new teams.
Here’s a quick roundup of my learnings over the last five weeks:
The Good:
- Dedicated time at the start for onboarding and inception helped with team alignment and eased blockers later down the line.
- Having an experienced kick-ass Project Manager like Kazza helped keep work on track and maintain momentum.
- Knowledgable Senior Developers brought additional insight and provided a great steer for Junior Developers. Hat tip to: Mashell Bokhari, Nicole Hussein, Dan Lemnariu and Maya.
- Fresh insights from user testing to inform our MVP.
- Reusing existing technology saves time, we used Algolia, a search and recommendation service.
The Bad:
- The development team involved in the creation of service recipes are no longer employed/ on the team and so there were significant gaps in the technical knowledge that created some blockers at the start. Chris Thorpe was a great help in unblocking some of these technical blockers.
- Capacity was a challenge, as I had a few different projects kicking off at the same time.
- The short time frame meant that user testing was fast-paced and a little limited.
- The team powered through so many illnesses and still showed up, even when we were feeling rough.
The Unexpected:
- I was surprised by how much can be achieved by such a small team in such a short space of time.
- Who knew implementing a ‘search functionality’ would involve so much scoping and decision making? Not this girl! 🤷🏽♀️ In the end we had over 40 tickets (stories, tasks, bugs, etc.) logged for this project.
- I found myself wearing many different hats over the last few weeks: Product Owner, Researcher, Investigator, Tester, Recruiter…to name a few.
The final result:
Well, I couldn’t possibly talk about all that and not share our brand spanking new search feature on the recipes platform. It’s been fantastic to finally reach this milestone and to be able to act on feedback from users so swiftly.
Huge thanks to the Thoughtworks team for making this a reality! 👏🏽 🎉 🥳 👏🏽
