Project management map

If you don't have a proper project manager, you could do worse than to fill in the blanks in this punchlist. It's useful to have resources lined up to solve these problems.

• Strategy, research
  • Who do we think our customer is? What is their [[job-to-be-done]]?
  • Strategy research
  • Competitive analysis
  • Lean business canvas [[Lean canvas]]
  • User interviews
  • Field research
  • Market segments (for established product categories),
  • Trend-spotting research (for fashion)
  • Futures forecasting (pdf reports), [[ScenarioPlanning]], for startups.
• Kickoff, framing
  • Exploration, scoping (pdf reports)
  • Project brief (client services)
  • Branding guidelines (if any preexisting brand)
• Customer stories, user stories, job stories
  • [[Job Stories]]
  • [[User Stories]]
• Design Hypothesis
• Sitemap
• Wireframes
  • Information architecture
• User testing
  • Keynote interactive, etc
• Prototypes (test design hypothesis)
  • More User Testing
  • Loop back to Design Hypothesis
  • Make as many loops as necessary, each one should resolve risks and move you closer to finding product-market fit.
• Moodboards
• Interaction design, graphic design, motion design
• Styleguide
• Asset sharing and versioning (Drive? GH? Something else?)

Brand

• Brand guidelines
• Copy guidelines/voice
• Brand colors
• Applications

Frontend Development

• Mobile or web or something else?
• UI framework/toolkit [[React]] [[Elm]]
• Build tooling [[Rollup]] [[Babel]]
• Integration testing [[Selenium]]

User Research

• Automated (tool needed)
• Customer feedback in-app (tool needed)
• Metrics
• Analytics

Backend Development

• REST API
• Database structure
• Scaling/sharding/replication, [[Serverless]]
• Security/authentication/[[oAuth]]
• CDN/asset server
• Payments
• Real-time communication [[Websockets]]
• Unit tests

DevOps, Release engineering, release management

Release engineering:

• Farm out as much devops as possible by using [[serverless]], AWS, etc

Release management:

• Build scripts
• Nightly builds
• Continuous Integration [[TravisCI]]

Development process:

• Code peer review
• Someone else lands your code. Better yet, a bot. See the [[not rocket science rule]]
• Git branching strategy. [[Train model]] or [[master must always be deployable]]
• Automate everything: build bots, merge bots, CI bots

Documentation

• Wikis are an excellent way to capture institutional knowledge, but require buy-in from a critical mass of the team. Making them a habit is key.
  • [[Dokuwiki]] is pretty good. [[MoinMoin]] is spam-prone. [[Team documentation wiki]]
• Markdown files in a GitHub repo can function as a pretty good documentation hub. Leverage the GitHub pull request workflow.
• https://usecanvas.com/

Building a Team

• [[Charlie Kindel's 5 Ps]]

Project management

[[Project management]]

• Kanban [[Trello]]
• Communication [[Slack]] or [[IRC]], but be sure to implement team scrollback server for your channels.
• Automate as much grunt-work as possible with bots

Meetings:

• [[Daily standup]]
• [[Weekly Retrospective]]
• [[1:1 meetings]]

Avoiding the morass:

Teams need special breaks with routine to stay sharp. Otherwise you get stuck wandering in the wilderness. Tools:

• Work week
• Milestones
• Sprints

Remote:

• Google Hangouts
• [[Etherpad]]
• https://usecanvas.com/
• Slack

Community

• Forum [[Discourse]]
• [[RFC]]

[[Programming]], [[Development]], [[Project Management]]