Product discovery session for Release team
Hey everyone, Mark and I would like to kick off a Product Discovery Week together with all of you where we will explore a topic that's important to release in the near future, define an MVC deliverable, and then actually build it together, all over the course of five days, and with no other interruptions! This is an effort that I'm really excited about, and has the potential to represent a new way of working together where we really start taking these kinds of discovery and quick iterations sessions seriously.
You can see nice video about Mark's vision for product discovery here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqxPsmK8_NE, please take an hour to watch it over the next week or so. Feel free to ask any questions about product discovery in general after watching the video in the #g_release channel.
Please note that it's critical, at least for this first experiment, that the first few days be done synchronously, but that is not the long term vision for this idea.
Problems to solve (though, product discovery brings more benefits than just solving these problems)
- Communication problems (misunderstanding, half-understandings, conversations in "slow-motion" over days or weeks in issues)
- Speed. Product feels that we are getting slower, engineering feels we have to have more process and checks to be safe. Find a way to deliver more cooler stuff faster.
Goals for first try (highlight: determine how to make it more async next time)
- Defined and built cool feature over five days!
- Identified what went well/could be improved for product discovery in general
- Thoughts collected on how an async version might be effective in the next iteration
- Decided: can we use this (or a modified version) in 11.6 as a real test of delivering a full release worth of features in this way?
Tentative Dates
Oct 4-5, 8-10
During this session we will err on the side of synchronous, but with an eye to how we can make further iterations more and more async.
Potential ideas for product discovery session
- Serverless runner for tests/other ideas: Very open ended topic, maybe not quite as strategic as others but still good. Technically very interesting/fun.
- How can we be on top of CDRA?: Another nice open ended topic with structure (questionnaire) to organize things at a high level. In Q1 plan. Maybe not the most inspiring topic.
- Monitoring feedback loop: Interesting feature, in Q1. Involves AutoDevOps so maybe the team will feel "stuck" at points. More complex potentially.
- Reporting & Analytics solutions: In Q1. What can we show at the group or project level, maybe that we already have access to data to, to help teams do CD better? Good candidate because we come to a shared understanding of what good CD is.
- Secrets management v2: Q2 item, but an open-ended one and also one that's on Sid and other's minds. Pretty open ended and interesting topic, but maybe needs more domain knowledge to get started.
- Feature Flags v2: We'll have launched the POC as v1, but there's surely more we can do soon.
- Top Customer Issues: Look through high popularity items and look for inspiration
- Support product discovery better in Review Apps: Probably better for a second iteration, but we could look at how review apps/other CD features could support and integrate for better product discovery (working in same branch earlier, real data in review apps, better async support, ?)
Link to doc where some details have been discussed as well: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tBWjIOtTMQzx_lQQtsdGey_SG9x4Tt_A_SIzONYbFNo/edit