Product Development Workflow
A product development workflow applies to how products such as Project Catalyst can be improved over time.
Product development workflow
The following is an example product development workflow. This could be adjusted and refined to suit the needs of a given team. There is no perfect model, teams will be flexible in responding to each situation as they see fit.
Problem sensing - Gather problems about the ecosystem that community members are experiencing. Problem sensing should always be happening.
Problem categorisation - The problems should be categorised such as is it a technical problem? A process issue? Lack of certain functionality? Similar problems should be combined if they are a duplicate of an existing problem.
Problem details and context - What added details are needed to understand the problem, are their reasons it exists and hasn't been solved? Is there other contexts to consider such as another solution already being implemented that will impact this problem?
Vote on problem prioritisation - With knowledge of all the current ecosystem problems which are the biggest priority to resolve?
Suggest solutions - For any of the problems a solution approach can be suggested that's worth considering.
Solution details and context - What is the difficulty of integrating each of the solutions? How long would it take? Are there other considerations to make or potential knock on effects?
Vote on solution - For a given problem one of the potential solutions can be voted on to decide which one will be implemented.
Draft implementation plan - Voted on solutions can have a draft plan detailed out for how it will be implemented, this could the complete set of tasks to complete and any data that will be recorded to measure the success. This information should be public to allow anyone to provide feedback wherever necessary.
Execute initial implementation - An initial implementation can be executed based off the voted on solution and any plans made.
Gather feedback - The end user for that solution can provide feedback on the effectiveness of that solution along with if there are any areas for improvement.
Analyse success metric data - Data recorded to measure the success can be analysed to see if the solution has had the correct impact.
Iterate solution - Using the feedback provided and any success metric data the solution can be improved where necessary in a new iterated solution. The feedback, data analysis and iteration steps can be repeated as many times as needed.
Notes
Collaboration - Collaboration between multiple people is needed for every step of a product development process. Strong collaboration requires open, transparent and frequent communication from those involved in the process.
Consensus - Voting on problem prioritisation and solutions require a democratic voting process with participants who have enough knowledge of the ecosystem.
Open process - The information and decisions made from each part of the process should be open to the community. Feedback should be possible at any given stage.
Experimentation - Contributors working on different areas of any ecosystem will experiment on how they collaborate with each other to get impactful work done. It can be expected that approaches to improving products and processes to be updated regularly.
Resources
There are a number of ways to execute a product development workflow. Here are some examples thoughts and examples from Google, Shopify, GitLab, Product Plan and Asana.
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