How to Release in a Week

From Idea to MVP

Your First Tasks

How to work

Swarm!

  • Gang up on the problem. Mob program.
  • Right now: Schedule 2 or 3 synchronous team hackathons in the next few days
  • Work on one user story at a time
  • Test, commit, deploy, demo something new as fast as possible
    • Every 15 minutes or so

Slice!

  • End to end, from backend database to frontend user interface
  • What a user needs to see or do something, nothing more

Where to Start

Delighters vs Must-Haves

  • Kano model
    • Delighters: things to make people want your product
    • Must-haves: things so people will keep your product
  • Both are high value. Which to build first?
    • Delighters first, to have a viable product
    • Then, must-haves: to have a minimum product

Build The Simplest Useful Thing Possible

How to design

Design by Storytelling

  • A demo is a story with characters, context, problem, and payoff
    • Character: someone with a background, needs, and opinions
    • Context: the situation someone is in
    • Problem: a specific problem, one that arises often
    • Payoff: your app coming to the rescue!
  • Kim Goodwin on design scenarios

The 4-Panel Storyboard

Implement Payoff First

  • Imagine a home exercise workout app
  • 4-panel: Wanda, a work-at-home graphic artist, takes her mid-morning exercise break. She opens the WorkIt!, taps Start. WorkIt! starts calling out the steps in the exercise routine Wanda designed for herself.
  • What's the payoff for WorkIt?
  • Ergo, implement and test that, before anything else

Thanks to Hakim El Hattab for RevealJS