Week 2 Boot Camp - Product Management

The brief for this week's project received Monday morning is - "Using a Kanban board, manage cross-sectional teams to deliver a To-Do app in both web and mobile version. This would certainly be interesting, I thought to myself as I read. The design and building of this To-Do app affords us the opportunity to work with a Product Design team, Front-end Engineering team, Back-end Engineering team, Mobile App Developer and Quality Assurance team; managing the processes of the various stages of the product and delivering within the time frame given. This is no small task but we(Product Management team) were willing to do whatever it takes to deliver, knowing that such qualities as good communication, empathy, decisiveness amongst other things will be brought to bear in achieving this week's task. Now, we truly get to experience being Product Managers.

The Kanban board was created immediately on Trello and the link sent to all the other teams, here we could go with project flow, see and track what each team had to do, what they were doing, and what had been done. We called for a scrum meeting where all the teams were in attendance to talk about the project at hand, to know what each team would be doing-their roles, suggesting actionable steps with time frames so we all can deliver on the To-Do app.

Setting a time frame for deliverables came with much reluctance from the design team; we understood it would be tasking for them but it is on their designs that all the various developers will ride on, tests would also be carried out by the quality assurance team. As much as we empathized with them and tried to be as flexible as we could, we held our ground on the time frame set for them. All this showed to be where emotional intelligence was going to play a major role. By the end of meeting we had set a time for daily scrum meetings for the duration of the project; we also had the Kanban board to view.

It took so much discussions to get the Product designers to be at the same wavelength as us, getting them to send screens to developers as they create it to optimize time was such a herculean task. At the expiry of the set time(Wednesday morning) we had agreed for them to deliver, they weren't done yet... seeing it on the Kanban board and also confirming at the daily scrum meeting. This was a huge issue as this would be giving the developers less time to work, we explained this and encouraged them to finish and send to the developers before the end of that day.

Gratefully, the Frontend team received the web screens and commenced work that same day. The Backend team started building the To-Do API the next day. Now to the mobile developer; one man team(yes, you read right), he is tasked with the responsibility to at the barest minimum develop the major features of the To-do app design for the mobile version and implement the API endpoints. Fingers crossed. I do have to say that all the various teams have done well in carrying out their various tasks considering the time frame given for the project.

In retrospect, we see there's the need for improvement in effective communication, product road map implementation, ensuring everyone's on the same page at every point in time, quality representation and participation of all teams involved at every scrum meeting.

ROADMAP

Here's the link to the Kanban board : https://trello.com/b/vbpE5MgM

The link to the designs wireframe: https://www.figma.com/file/Se4InMNTpLJrwp0M8NstNx/Bootcamp-projects?node-id=650%3A6022

To Do App(TaskBot) Web version : https://moh922.github.io/TaskBot/

To Do App(TaskBot) Mobile Version