Purpose of this document
This document outlines the overall product development process MVPRockets/Napses Product team would follow for successful completion of a project – with high quality and adhering to the timelines planned
Owner of this Document
Giridharan N – giri@napses.com
Tools Used
- Notion for Road map, project management
- Slack for Inter team communication
- Whatsapp/Call in case urgent
Overview
Our overall product management revolves around 5 important steps
Understand —> Write —> Draw —> code —> Ship
As we get closer to Ship, the mistakes & changes are expensive. The earlier we get clarity on the product to be built, the better it is. The entire team should work towards getting clarity & building the right product as early as possible. This essentially means that each of these steps are sacrosanct & can not be skipped.
However, these 5 steps happen across different phases in each of the project & the different phases of the project are as explained below
Contract Signing —> inception —> Estimation —> Development —> Roadmap
Contract Signing
Talk to me on giri@napses.com 🙂
Inception
Once the basic contract is signed, we go through a 1 month “Inception” period. The aim of this process is to get complete understanding of the overall product – the user, context, problem & the proposed solution.
Here a team of 3 interacts with the entrepreneurs.
- Product Lead – Typically, the product lead is one of the senior folks in the company (CPO/CEO or someone of similar experience) who has done multiple MVPs in the past. The role of the product lead is to give oversight to the entire product, ask the right questions & facilitate the right design & development decisions
- Product Manager – The product manager is the single point owner of the entire product. the responsibilities include solving/answering the questions through research & prototyping, manage the product end-to-end, maintain the documentation, explain to the developers the overall product scope & is responsible for the entire delivery of the product in time & with highest of quality
- UI/UX Designer – The designer brings the design thinking to the overall product, understands the user, problem, context & is responsible for the overall experience & visual aspects of the product.
Understand
Owner: PM [Secondary Owner: Product Head]
Output: Business Explainer Document
Purpose: To clearly understand the the business & about the product being built. this is a document that the entire product team, including the developers should read before going into a product. Once the document is complete, the ownership transfers to the product manager of the product. For all practical purposes this is a larger version of the popular business model canvas where we try and pen down the users, user context, their problems, unique insights, hypothesis to be validated/invalidated through MVP, possible solutions, competition, business/revenue model, TAM/SAM/SOM etc..
Format: A notion document – Our template can be found here –
Approval required: yes, from the client
Write
Owner: Product manager {Secondary Owner: product head]
Output: Actors & Jobs to be done, User flow, Epics & stories
Purpose: To convert the business problem identified in the previous step into tangible user stories & create a clear Roadmap/backlog
it should contain the following sections
- Context
- Problem
- Solution
- Acceptance criteria
- List of screens
Format: A Notion inline board + “By epic” View
The same can be found here –
Approval required: yes, from client, Product head
Draw
Owner: Designer
Prerequisite:
Brand guidelines, Design guidelines – to be given by the entrepreneur
Output:
- Visual direction
- Wireframes/Mocks
Purpose: To convert the user stories written in the previous step into a visual form
it should follow the design guidelines provided by the client
Format: Zeplin board – Screenshots to be embedded in the respective cards
Approval required: yes, from Vinayak + Product Manager, client
Estimation
Once the inception team has created the product docket, we add the tech team to the project & the first step here is to estimate the overall complexity of the product – timelines required to complete this.
We follow the agile process of development diligently & use story points based estimation. The concept of story points is fairly simple. The entire team, along with the inception team sits & looks at each of the stories written in the earlier phase & looks at the designs. Once a fair understanding is reached by everyone, we look at each of the stories & try to estimate the complexity of each of them. The story points is the measure of the complexity & we use a Fibonacci series estimation where a story can be 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 or 13 points(We try to avoid 13 pointers as much as possible)
Once each of the stories are estimated, we have the total number of story points for the entire project.
Based on our prior experience, we know what the velocity of a team would be. With this velocity, we would be able to estimate the total time required for the entire project.
This is when we communicate the timelines for the overall project.
Development
Once we have the team in place & the estimation in place, we split the large deliverable into manageable chunks called milestones & the milestones internally have 1 or 2 sprints in them this is communicated to the entire team along with the entrepreneurs.
Code
Owner: Architect, Lead, team {Secondary Owner: Praveen M V}
Output: Architecture Document + working Product
Purpose: To clearly architect the solution & build the right product 🙂
Approval required: yes, from Praveen (Head of Engineering/Delivery)
Ship
Owner: Devops, Satish(CTO)
The Product set up should have
- Dev server
- UAT
- Prod Server
The movement of features should go from Dev —> UAT —> Prod
Testing in the Dev server should be done by the Dev
Testing in the UAT server should be done by the PM (QA should report into PM)
Once when all the unit test cases pass & PM gives a go ahead for a feature, should it go to the Prod
Roadmap
Once the MVP is launched, the team continues to work with the entrepreneur and help with the roadmap and continues to do so until the entrepreneur is ready to take the product development inhouse.
Project Structure
A project should ideally follow the following structure in Notion
- Project Name
- Business Explainer
- Business Docs
- Road Map
- Tech Docs