Product Teams & Software Development

Physic Ventures8/6/2012

The People

Developers

PM

TestDesign

Sales BD Evangelism Product Marketing

Usability

Content

Internationalization

Cross-platform

• Every project needs a great lead developer• 50-75% of the day spent hacking• 25-50% code reviews, writing automation,

architecture/design meetings• Love lean process, more time coding• Teams work best with ~ 5 devs– > 5 devs = new team

Developers

Product Manager

• 1 PM per project• Priority #1: prioritized list of features• 50% of time spent inbound with dev, design,

test, specing features and making sure everything works

• 50% of time spent outbound with customers, marketing, evangelists, BD, sales

• Good hire when the team hits 2 devs

Test/SDET/QA

• Need for testers depends on the project – fault tolerance, complexity, international, cross-platform plan

• Testers write code that attempts to break the product

• Stress and performance test – huge issue• Good hire when the team hits 3 devs

Design

• Must hire if building a consumer-facing service• Designers have UX and/or visual design

expertise– Be wary of visual designers without UX experience– Visual design is easier to contract out– Few university degrees or programs teach this skill

• 1 designer to a 5 dev team• If the designer is also usability testing or

content writing, likely to have a busy schedule

Sales/BD/Evangelism/Marketing

• Product marketing handles messaging and pricing

• Evangelists are important for platforms, especially developer services, work closely with PMs

• Sales/BD funnel feedback and feature requests to the PM

What Developers Want

• Great technical co-founder!– Should be a great manager, mentor, creator of

culture, and leader, NOT the most technical person the other founder knows

• Sexy consumer brand!– Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Pinterest, etc.

• Geek-out worthy product!– Anything cloud, anything AI, developer tools

Hiring and Retaining Developers

• Technical co-founder should be able to staff the first feature team with his network– Must be well liked by previous employees– Must know the ideal process/perks for hiring devs– Don’t invest in a team who’s CTO doesn’t meet these

qualifications!• As the team grows

– Hire interns & recent college grads (especially away from SF)– Referrals

• Hiring seasoned technical talent is really difficult– Provide meaningful equity

Process• Design

– PM: Requirement gathering, scenario building– Designer + PM: Development of non-functional prototypes– Designer + PM: Testing, iteration of non-functional prototypes– Lead dev + PM: Development of technical architecture and API requirements

• Development– Developers: code, check-in, test– Designer + PM: UX test the build, gather data– PM + Lead Dev: triage bugs– Test: write automation

• Support + iteration– PM + Design: gather data about product usage– PM: prioritize new features + bug fixes– Developers: refactor, rearchitect, clean up, fix bugs– Test: identify bugs

Agile is…

• Sometimes called SCRUM– Burn down, product backlog

• Managing a complex project as discrete 2 week releases

• Improves quality and agility over waterfall

How does code turn into a product?

• Track time, work items, burndown• Write code in an IDE (editor, build automation,

debugger)• Code reviews, test automation (test harness)• Commit/check-in to GitHub (version control,

source code repository)• Deploy finished bits/executable onto

AWS/hosting server/iTunes store

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hellhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqPYeTSYng

A few words on design…

• Great design is hard• Design is contentious• The best designers have well-honed intuition

hard to interview and hire for• Designers tend to be paid less and respected

less than developers• A few designer-founded startups: Airbnb, Path,

Pinterest, Tumblr, Hipstamatic, Etsy, Instagram, Fab

Usability Testing

• Watch the user complete discrete tasks• Good for:– Can the user figure out what is going on?– Does the UX flow make sense?– Is there anything distracting/awful?– Sanity check: is there anything important missing?

• Bad for:– Determining real-world engagement– Learning what users like/don’t like

A/B and Multivariate Testing

• No one uses A/B testing anymore• Multivariate testing used to tests hypotheses on

complex multi-variable systems• Good for what you know you don’t know: (Google)– Conversion funnels– Getting a user to commit a particular action

• Bad for what you don’t know you don’t know: (Twitter)– Validating design– Encouraging stickiness