- They have a brand-new not very clear idea
- They need to demo something next week
- They need to user test right after that
- You haven't a clue what they want or if you can do it
Working with Clients
No Time to Waste!
Th9s Week's Top Goals
- End of kickoff meeting: a Panel 3
- ... with realistic data
- ... that demonstrates value
- ... that you can implement front and back in a day or two
- End of Iteration 1:
- a demoable prototype of Panel 3
- a substantially less nervous client team
Kickoff Meeting Goals
- Meet and greet
- Establish communication channel
- Schedule mid-week check-in time and method
- Define what you'll deliver this week
Meet and Greet
- Before: Fix your team slide in shared folder to
- include at least name, level (junior, senior, MS), major, email
- clearly identify the team's primary contact person
- During: Get emails and primary contact for client team
- Slack or Facebook Messenger ONLY if all members of both teams are already use and prefer it.
Primary Contact
- One contact person on each team
- sends all inter-team emails
- CCs everyone on both teams (normally not me)
- gently points out when counterpart fails to CC everyone
- This enables:
- Easy tracking of communications
- Fewer missed or mixed messages
- More team discussion before replying
Mid-week Check-in Deliverables
- A demoable rough draft of the first deliverable
- Swarm with two days of each face-to-face meeting
- A list of issues identified, with potential resolutions:
- Clarification issues: offer two or three likely interpretations
- Implementation obstacles: offer two or three alternatives you could do pretty quickly
Iteration 1 Deliverables
- A demo of the first slice they can show in the MPD class
- Expo client app is fine, but schedule an early midweek setup and training session.
- Instructions or live walkthrough of how to run the demo
- Deliver 24 hours before they demo, so that they can test and practice
Client meetings
- Twice a week
- hour-long face-to-face review and planning
- half-hour midweek check-in about 3 days later
- Active listening at every meeting
- Have a designated notetaker
- Listen more than talk
- Email a summary of immediate tasks and questions within 24 hours
Client Survey
- Ask the client every week how things are going.
- Keep this short and open-ended. E.g.,
- Are we meeting your expectations?
- Did we miss anything?
- Did we assume something we should not have?
- Don't ask for a rating. People hate to rate people.
Working Prototype
- An end-to-end user-testable implementation of the payoff in their 4-panel
- Get realistic data from them
- Use Material UI or similar for a simple but clean UI
- Architect for change
- DTSTTCPW
- YAGNI
- Isolate dubious decisions
Team Roles
- Task tracker
- Manages list of undone tasks and deadlines
- Asks who is doing this, is it done yet, ...
- Raises the red flag early
- Note taker
- Takes notes during (not after) client meetings
- Must resist being too active in conversation
- Prepares client summary, with notes from rest of team
- Takes notes during (not after) client meetings
- Both of these can be rotating roles
Product backlog
- Have a shared document with prioritized user stories
- The Client Project folder on the Google Drive is shared with them. They can see and edit any documents you put there.
Iteration Taskboard
- Trello or some similar tool is best
- Editable by clients and developers
- Only stories for the current and next iteration
- All stories should have concrete test examples and UI sketches
- Clients sort stories in Ready to do
- Clients move stories from Ready to review to Done
Thanks to Hakim El Hattab for RevealJS