#54 - You got a dev and a designer. What next?
Firstly, sorry I usually send this out on a Sunday!
Let’s go - today I will discuss what you should be doing when you feel like you have the engineering (or dev if you like) and design talent in your team.
So okay, you’ve worked on your side hustle. Managed to find a cool designer who’s learning interaction design and you’ve got an engineer who you have actually known since school. She has been coding for the past 5 years and you can’t keep up with all the coding languages she has learned but she knows a lot about cloud computing.
You as the hustler, are responsible for selling into your network and you also have been sharpening your user interview skills and learned so much more about your users and its starting to make sense which you’re hella excited about.
Because you and your founding team are all busy, and its late at night, you want to send detailed requirements for them to work on in the day but you feel like you’re restricting the team by trying to tell them will build. Afterall, they’re both smart peeps so they might have good ideas of their own and you know you can’t be too detailed because you don’t know much about what can/can ’t be built. You want to download Basecamp but its expensive and getting Trello working is taking long because the others haven’t really used it.
Do you know what you do? You get a whiteboard, pen and post-it notes and you start telling stories.
Say what?!
Yes stories about your customers.
You see when you’ve done 10 user interviews (and recorded them for bonus) and you’re starting to really understand the problems to be solved. It is here you can capture that insight with story mapping.
User Stories, Story Mapping. These all create alignment with the team and its a reminder of the convo’s you have been having with users in a way that engineers and developers can work of.
Let's Build Great Products
These are the kind of tools to start getting stuff done.
As much as I hate seeing it, many early-stage startups are working with devs across the globe sending tons of emails and struggling to communicate. This should be your friend.
No complicated software to download https://t.co/Mwghuz6cof
Good Reads
Internet Trends 2018 - must read to understand tech industry
Legendary investor Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report of stats and charts to the most important insights. Scroll through to learn what’s up with internet growth, screen addiction, e-commerce, Amazon versus Alibaba, tech investment and artificial intelligence. Here’s 20 slides from TechCrunch breaking down the key takeaways
Prototyping Future Digital Story with the BBC
Here my friend Alex shares some of the work he has done in a consultative manner for the BBC.
What I like about this is he is talking from experience of running his own Design Sprint and you can see the goals he and his team has set and the learnings that are being shared.
Helpful Tool(s)
Online JSON Viewer
If like me you can’t write in Javascript, then this tool might be handy.
(it got sent to me by a developer at work)