How to design open source products at the same time? Maybe for large Internet companies, software companies this is not a problem, each project team has enough product managers, front-end and back-end developers.
As a start-up team, we have made six open source products at present, and the r&d resources for each product are certainly limited. To maintain the iterations of these products at the same time, a relatively stable product design process is required, otherwise it is easy to give priority to one and lose the other.
Here to share the experience of product maintenance, if there is unreasonable place welcome to put forward, help us to further improve.
More products, more users, more sources of demand. We created an Excel in the graphite document named requirements Pool to collect all product requirements. Requirements Pool Excel lists the requirement content, requirement source, product type, whether it was processed, and when it was recorded.
For users who have purchased product authorization, we have developed a work order system for users to submit functional suggestions. The product manager will check the content of the work order system every day and make a reply. Reasonable functional suggestions will be recorded in the requirement pool and the requirement source will be marked as the work order system.
Then each product has a dedicated product after-sales group, which often has very active discussions. Demand-related discussions are forwarded to the internal product group, and the product manager will mark the source of demand as the product after-sales group after collecting it in the demand pool.
In order to maintain the competitiveness of each product, the product manager should regularly take the initiative to research the market demand, such as in-depth communication with users, experience and learn industry leading products, etc., such demand sources are marked as market research.
When the requirements pool is set up, you will see the requirements in the requirements pool accumulate very quickly, more and more. Next, we use another Excel, called the Product Work Schedule, to record the requirements that can be selected from the requirements pool for product design. In this Excel, you need to identify requirements design priorities, which are used to prioritize.
Finally, we have an Excel named Product Iteration Schedule. We will divide the content of the product work schedule into different product versions according to the priority and record it in the product Iteration Schedule. This ensures that the version of the product to be developed has been designed.
According to the above process, the product department has already planned the content of the next version of each product. There will be competition for development resources between different products, but it doesn’t matter, and the project manager will allocate the rest.
This is the way we maintain many open source products now. It may not be right, but it works stably now. I hope it will help you.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.