After watching my mobile friend submit the project to the app store, I went back to my workstation and recalled the “ups and downs” the whole project went through from the demand to this moment. It was really unforgettable. In this project, what impressed me most was not the work related to products and demands, but the promotion of the whole project, which also made me understand the importance of the product leader’s project promotion ability in an entrepreneurial team with limited team resources.
I will divide the project into the following six stages:
- Product requirements review meeting
- Project planning
- Daily early meeting
- test
- online
- Phase summary meeting
Here’s how a product manager can move the project forward based on his team, by looking at the pits he stepped into and how he jumped out of them.
First, the product requirements review meeting.
Product requirements review meeting
Almost every product before the formal development of the necessary step. Project personnel can analyze the rationality and feasibility of the requirements and solutions output by the product manager through the requirements review meeting, and understand the functional logic and business logic through the requirements review meeting.
Due to the tight schedule of the project at that time, we didn’t have much time to understand and think about the business logic after the meeting. At that time, we said that there were no obvious problems, so we started the formal development according to the project plan.
In the second half of the project, I found that there were two key points missing in the project. First, our team was just established at that time, and everyone focused on their own work. The second is that technical friends don’t like to read product requirements documents. This leads to a poor understanding of the product’s business and requirements, which in turn leads to inefficiencies during development.
This is the reason for the great delay of the project. However, after this profound understanding, product managers in the product demand review meeting (before review, review, review) stage, need to pay attention to the following three points:
- The first is to make sure that the requirements, the business, pass the review and there are no obvious mistakes
- Ensure that developers have a deep understanding of product requirements and business logic
- After a deep understanding of the requirements, business, and functionality of the product, make an accurate assessment of the project development time and hold yourself accountable for that time
Project planning is carried out after product review.
Granularity of project planning
In fact, this part belongs to the project manager, but since we do not have a project manager at the initial stage of the project, the product manager is responsible for this part of the work. Was a developer function through the list to assess the needs of the function of each respective development time, identify and discuss the main core modules about alignment time before and after the end, then my side according to the time to collect all feedback, according to the MVP pattern to function as size of project development plan, a milestone for weeks, Then the development was done weekly according to the priority of the function, and the progress of the project was controlled through the daily morning meeting and daily.
After two weeks of development in accordance with the above plan, its disadvantages slowly emerged. For every feature that needs to be done every week, developers will have one or two features that are not done, or all of them are done, but the process can’t run.
I was confused about this situation. What was the problem? Is there a problem with the current project planning?
If I am a developer, can I complete this arrangement? After perspective-taking, I found that it was difficult to implement the project planning at that time. Although the weekly goals and priorities were clear, the daily tasks were uncertain. In other words, the key to the problem is that the task scheduling is too granular and requires good execution by the developer. But the team is still lacking in this area, so this is the situation.
Now that the problem has been identified, the optimization plan is made. The goal is to advance the project by refining the task granularity, so that the project can be successfully completed on time. So how do you break down the tasks? Although I have a technical background, I have not been exposed to background development, so I cannot make detailed task arrangements for the development side. At this moment, a big bull, a project manager at Toutiao, joined our team and worked with me to promote the project.
The project manager’s participation just makes up for my lack of technical coordination. Therefore, in the first week after the project manager joined the team, we made an optimization plan for the current situation of the team. In the general direction, we followed the previous arrangement, that is, the project planning and taking the week as the milestone. The optimization was to refine the weekly target and assign it to each day and hand. Then, I arranged the work of the day through the daily morning meeting to control and promote the progress of the project.
Although the weekly progress is still delayed due to some uncontrollable factors, it is generally controllable and the working process of the whole team is much smoother.
From this incident also let me understand:
- It is difficult for product managers to advance projects without understanding technical management. Understanding of the development process needs to be enhanced.
- In the process of project advancement, the granularity of task arrangement should be determined according to each person’s ability, which is very important and will directly affect the development progress of the project.
Daily early meeting
The daily morning meeting is an important part of agile development.
The main form of the daily morning meeting is to get all the team members together, and then organize by the product manager or project manager, each member of the team to review yesterday’s work completed (if not, why not?). “, what problems you encountered and what your schedule is for the day. In this way, you can control the progress of the current project.
The daily morning meeting almost runs through the whole project development phase. If the project development phase is compared to a chain, then the daily morning meeting is the node in the chain. The daily morning meeting not only allows the product manager to better control the status and current progress of the project, but also enables the product manager to identify problems as early as possible, analyze and solve problems.
The daily morning meeting is an effective means to promote the project:
- Pay attention to three directions, yesterday’s completion, whether there are problems, today’s task arrangement
- The morning meeting time is controlled within 15 minutes, so we won’t take up too much time
A way to mention bugs
At the late stage of the project development, it entered the testing phase.
From the point of view of now, our whole test module arrangement was not very standard, mainly reflected in two problems. First, the granularity of the test arrangement was too large, which was based on the small version in the MVP. The second problem is that our team did not have testers at the early stage, only the product manager assisted the test, so the depth of the test was not enough, the quality of the later version was not up to standard, and there were many details problems, even process problems.
Later in the project, we added testers who focused on the first version of the product. For the whole test process, summarize the points that need to be paid attention to in the process.
- In the late stage of the project, there is less work in the background, so if the bugs in the test are not obvious front-end problems, they should be assigned to the background first, and then assigned to the foreground after eliminating the problems in the background.
- Bugs submitted for testing should be placed in a Bug pool, and then the product manager sets the priority of Bug resolution and assigns people to follow up.
- After fixing the Bug in the Bug pool, it is necessary to confirm the problem again by the test before it can be officially solved. In this way, the same problem will not occur again in the later stage because the developer mistakenly thinks that the Bug is solved by omission.
- After the mobile terminal fixes the Bug before the end of work every day, it is necessary to send a new test version to the internal test management platform, and update the internal test version number and the repaired content, which is very important. When we promoted the project, the Android developer did not have this habit. As a result, the test girl had to locate bugs one by one, which greatly increased the workload of the test.
Stage summary meeting
After a month of development time, we completed the development of the first version, but only to complete the development, the functional process barely run, there are still many problems, at this time, stage summary meeting is particularly important.
The meeting should first clarify the purpose of the meeting:
- State the current situation
- Exposed problems
- Find the cause of the problem
- To solve the problem
Then throw up the severity of the problem by comparing the current version to the planned version. Present the main problems, such as:
- IOS launch review issue
- The XXX module is not running properly
- The XXX function is faulty…
Why does this happen now? The product manager, as the person in charge, listed the problems existing in each module, as shown in the figure below, which was part of the module problems I listed in the phase summary meeting for the current team, and attached some suggestions from the perspective of the product manager:
For each existing problem, we carried out targeted discussions in the meeting, and found solutions, and then optimized in the subsequent work. Then we emphasize the execution of the optimization plan (because we have experienced a lot, the solution only appears in the meeting). If we encounter the same problem, we need to respond immediately; otherwise, we need the project manager and product manager to assist the execution.
For the phase summary meeting, the most important points are:
- The meeting purpose
- State the current situation
- Exposed problems
- Find the cause of the problem
- To solve the problem
- The implementation
conclusion
From the product requirements review, project planning, daily project progress, test and phase meeting, the entire project to promote work well embodies the executive ability of the product manager, although in most of the companies in the stage of the work is in the charge of the project manager, but the product manager also needs to have the control of the product quality and process capability, the owner of the product and Be responsible for the product in the process of requirements and project advancement.