From Idea to Product: Building Features

Features don't begin with new code or user interface sketches, they often start with an idea, problem, or complaint. This talk walks through the many different ways concepts become ideas, along with the different roles involved in the process of bringing ideas to life.

Transcript

1. From Idea to Product Building Features Liz Abinante • @feministy
2. Overview Terminology Roles Workflow What happens next?
3. Terminology use case ROI designer developer project manager product manager API agile sprint planning staging QA pull request server git
4. Feature Something new that adds functionality to an application, service, or other tool.
5. Bug When something is not working as intended or expected. Sometimes expectations change.
6. Agile Development methodology that helps teams release faster by promoting communication. Includes stand up and sprint planning.
7. Sprint planning A sprint is a pre-determined amount of time that is used for planning and metrics. Sprint planning is a team meeting where you decide what to work on during the sprint.
8. Acceptance criteria Determined by the Product or Project Manager, acceptance criteria are the bare requirements for the feature. Things it should, or should not, do.
9. Wireframes Wireframes are outlined pen-and-paper or digital sketches of the app or website layout inside of browsers, phones, tablets, and other devices.
10. Mockups Mockups are a digital rendering of the user interface. Sometimes they’re functional mockups with clickable items, others they’re a visual aid.
11. Prototype A mostly-working, or barely-working, alpha version of a product.
12. MVP MVP stands for minimum viable product. The goal is to achieve the best usable product in the smallest amount of effort and time.
13. Roles
14. Project Project Managers usually oversee smaller, on-going efforts (projects!). Examples include: accessibility, compatibility initiatives, and minor non-technical upgrades or changes.
15. Product Product Managers have a more narrow focus and are isolated to one team, feature, or product. There are also Technical Product Managers, who oversee actual implementation (code!).
16. Product Manager The primary point of contact for the feature. They decide acceptance criteria, negotiate deadlines, and work across teams. They own it.
17. Sometimes you have more than one Product Manager.
18. Sometimes you have a Project and a Product Manager.
19. Designers This is complicated. Some designers code, some don’t.
20. Designers Designers make wireframes and visual mockups. They are responsible for branding, color schemes, typography, and more. They sometimes work with Marketing, too.
21. Ux Ui Engineers Designers who code are often called UX/UI Engineers. They also make wireframes and mockups, and work across teams. They make design prototypes or write the front end code.
22. Design and Engineering are sometimes separate teams or departments.
23. This never causes problems
24. Developers There are lots of different kinds of developers. Back-end developers work on the server code. Front-end developers work on the UI. Full-stack developers work on both.
25. Developers No matter what code you work on, developers all write tests.
26. The number of developers on a feature depends on its size, not the skill of the developer.
27. Quality Assurance QAs can be manual- or automation-focused. Manual QAs click through elements to make sure things work. Automation QAs write tests that automate the manual process of clicking things.
28. Not all companies have QA
29. Team With their powers combined, this team creates a feature. Like magic.
30. Workflow
31. It starts with an idea. But where does that idea come from?
32. Who? Ideas and requests for new features come from internal and external sources.
33. Customers Customers are a great source for innovation. Sometimes complaints become new features. Other times, customers have awesome ideas.
34. Competition If your competition adds something new, you might add the same feature to stay relevant. Sometimes competition can totally botch an in- demand new feature, giving you room to outperform.
35. Market Trends shift, technology fades in and out, fads change. What’s in-demand today could be useless or completely forgotten tomorrow.
36. Engineers We like to make news things. We like to make things bigger, better, faster, stronger, cooler. We think we can make it better than everyone else.
37. Product Outside of your customers, your Product team knows your stuff better than anyone else. They’re a hot bed of ideas, and are really great at preliminary research, too.
38. Executives The executives in charge of your company sometimes get wild hairs and decide to micromanage unnecessarily by requesting features. This is usually a pain, but they’re still features!
39. Investors Sigh.
40. You have an idea. Now what?
41. Product They create user stories and acceptance criteria that serve as the roadmap for the feature.
42. Product They do research - sometimes with focus groups - to solidify functionality. They coordinate with Design to build a UI.
43. Design For brand new applications, this process is much more involved: wireframes, mockups, prototypes, branding, etc all have to be made.
44. Design For existing projects with style guides, layouts, etc in place, Designers usually create a mockup using existing assets for the engineering team.
45. Engineering As soon as Product starts working on a feature, they’re working with engineering. Leads are assigned to the project, and projections are made.
46. Engineering Technical challenges are outlined and estimated. Engineers are assigned to the task. Code gets written! Code gets reviewed. Code gets deleted and re-written.
47. Testing Engineers write tests for their code, and QA runs through manual tests, or writes automated integration tests. Testing is a continuous process.
48. Iterating Engineering and Product re-visit the feature and make changes to the code as they go along, or they change the expectations. They start with small pieces of the feature and build up from there.
49. Eng + Prod Together, they develop the feature. Engineering makes technical implementation decisions, Product makes decisions about how that technology will be used.
50. Product, Design, Engineering, and QA work as a team.
51. It’s not like this:
52. It’s like this:
53. What’s next?
54. Beta Some companies have beta groups that test new features for them. The beta period is an opportunity to fine tune and improve features before releasing them to all users.
55. Release It’s aliiiiiiiiiiiive.
56. Feedback Processing feedback is done best when there is a reliable, easy way of collecting it from your users.
57. Understanding Use Metrics, error reporting, and analytics are tools that can be used to help you better understand how your feature is being used by customers and make changes to your code accordingly.
58. Bugs There will (inevitably) be bugs that need fixing. Customers will communicate these to your company one way or another, and you fix them.
59. Version X? Sometimes a feature comes out half baked. If this is the case, Product and Engineering take customer feedback and use it to come up with the next iteration or version of the product.
60. Celebrate! You did it!
61. Lather, rinse, repeat.
62. Liz Abinante @feministy • me@liz.codes ! Hey, thanks for listening!
63. Attribution From the Noun Project: ! Idea by Stefano Vetere Comment by Jardson A. Injection, Move, and Scrum by Dmitry Baranovskiy Cycle by Attilio Baghino Next by SuperAtic LABS Pawn wizard by Till Teenck Devices by San Salido Martínez