From Idea to Product
Building Features
Liz Abinante • @feministy
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Overview
Terminology
Roles
Workflow
What happens next?
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Terminology
use case
ROI
designer
developer
project manager
product manager
API
agile
sprint planning
staging
QA
pull request
server
git
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Feature
Something new that
adds functionality to an application,
service, or other tool.
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Bug
When something is not working
as intended or expected.
Sometimes expectations change.
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Agile
Development methodology that helps teams
release faster by promoting communication.
Includes stand up and sprint planning.
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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.
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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.
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Wireframes
Wireframes are outlined pen-and-paper or digital
sketches of the app or website layout inside of
browsers, phones, tablets, and other devices.
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Mockups
Mockups are a digital rendering of the user
interface. Sometimes they’re functional mockups
with clickable items, others they’re a visual aid.
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Prototype
A mostly-working, or barely-working,
alpha version of a product.
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MVP
MVP stands for minimum viable product.
The goal is to achieve the best usable product in
the smallest amount of effort and time.
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Roles
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Project
Project Managers usually oversee smaller,
on-going efforts (projects!). Examples include:
accessibility, compatibility initiatives, and minor
non-technical upgrades or changes.
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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!).
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Product Manager
The primary point of contact for the feature.
They decide acceptance criteria, negotiate
deadlines, and work across teams. They own it.
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Sometimes you have
more than one
Product Manager.
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Sometimes you have
a Project and a
Product Manager.
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Designers
This is complicated.
Some designers code, some don’t.
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Designers
Designers make wireframes and visual mockups.
They are responsible for branding, color schemes,
typography, and more. They sometimes work with
Marketing, too.
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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.
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Design and Engineering
are sometimes separate
teams or departments.
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This never causes
problems
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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.
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Developers
No matter what code you work on,
developers all write tests.
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The number of developers on
a feature depends on its size,
not the skill of the developer.
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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.
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Not all companies
have QA
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Team
With their powers combined,
this team creates a feature.
Like magic.
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Workflow
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It starts with an idea.
But where does that
idea come from?
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Who?
Ideas and requests for new features
come from internal and external sources.
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Customers
Customers are a great source for innovation.
Sometimes complaints become new features.
Other times, customers have awesome ideas.
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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.
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Market
Trends shift, technology fades in and out, fads
change. What’s in-demand today could be useless
or completely forgotten tomorrow.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Investors
Sigh.
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You have an idea.
Now what?
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Product
They create user stories and acceptance criteria
that serve as the roadmap for the feature.
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Product
They do research - sometimes with focus
groups - to solidify functionality.
They coordinate with Design to build a UI.
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Design
For brand new applications, this process is much
more involved: wireframes, mockups, prototypes,
branding, etc all have to be made.
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Design
For existing projects with style guides, layouts, etc
in place, Designers usually create a mockup using
existing assets for the engineering team.
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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.
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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.
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Testing
Engineers write tests for their code, and QA runs
through manual tests, or writes automated
integration tests. Testing is a continuous process.
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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.
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Eng + Prod
Together, they develop the feature.
Engineering makes technical implementation
decisions, Product makes decisions about how that
technology will be used.
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Product, Design,
Engineering, and QA
work as a team.
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It’s not like this:
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It’s like this:
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What’s next?
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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.
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Release
It’s aliiiiiiiiiiiive.
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Feedback
Processing feedback is done best when there is a
reliable, easy way of collecting it from your users.
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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.
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Bugs
There will (inevitably) be bugs that need fixing.
Customers will communicate these to your
company one way or another, and you fix them.
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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.
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Celebrate!
You did it!
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Lather, rinse,
repeat.
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Liz Abinante
@feministy • me@liz.codes
!
Hey, thanks for listening!
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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