Agile methodology use in Humanity.com, workforce management platform

1. Product Definition
Agile Product Development

2. What is agile product
development?
The Agile methodology is an iterative
approach to product development that is
performed in a collaborative environment
by self - organising & multifunctional teams.
The methodology produces high-quality
software in a cost-effective and timely
manner to meet stakeholders’ changing
needs.

4. Get into rabbit
hole…

5. Users
We can divide users in 3 types:
• Experts!
• Willing adopters!
• Mainstreamers

6. Experts
• Happy to explore and to push
the limits of what they can do
• They want never-before-seen
technology that is customised
for them
• Even if they’re new to a
product, they have an expert
attitude
• Eg: browse through the
mobile phone’s file system
and tweak everything

7. Willing adopters
• They probably already use some
similar products or services.
• Tempted to use something more
sophisticated
• Not comfortable playing with
something entirely new they need to
be given easy ways to adopt new
features.
• Tolerance for learning is pretty low
• They might be interested in a more
sophisticated phone, but only if they
can transfer their precious contacts
easily

8. Mainstreamers
• Don’t use technology for its own sake -
They use it to get a job done.
• Tend to learn a few key features and
never add to their repertoire.
• They say: ”I just want my mobile phone
to work.”
• Most people fall into this group.
• It has more to do with their underlying
attitude toward technology than the
amount of time they spend using a
product or service.

9. Experts
Willing to adopt
Mainstreamers
User Types compared

10. Real life example
• Apple’s expert customers wanted a
flying car.
• Apple’s mainstream customers just
wanted an MP3 player that worked.

11. Result?
As of January 2010, Apple had sold
240,000,000 iPods and no flying cars.

13. Build for mainstreamers
• Mainstreamers are interested in getting the job done now
experts are interested in customising their settings first.
• Mainstreamers value ease of control
experts value precision of control.
• Mainstreamers want reliable results
experts want perfect results.
• Mainstreamers are afraid of breaking something
experts want to take things apart to see how they work.
• Mainstreamers want a good match
experts want an exact match.
• Mainstreamers want examples and stories
experts want principles.

14. User Experience & Emotional
needs
“It turned out to be about making the user feel
good about putting things off/done. We needed
to make the user feel confident that they’d be
able to put tasks away and find them again later.”
Jürgen Schweizer, Things (iOS task management)
They're in Control
Users want to feel in control of the technology
they’re using.

15. Describing User Experience
Use stories to describe problem
Unlike a list of requirements, it helps the
team understand what’s important and why.
A story should sum up the core experience in a few
sentences.
Sessions: How would i tell the manager why I am
late and where am I? (traffic, outdoor, partial focus)

17. Simplicity & Mobile First
Difference between usability and simplicity

18. Make it simple
How we can make some
complex interface simpler
and easier to use?

19. • Remove - get rid of all the unnecessary elements
until the device is stripped back to its essentials.
• Organize - arrange the elements into groups that
make more sense.
• Hide - hide all but the most important elements so
they don’t distract users.
• Displace - create a very simple UI with a few basic
features and access the rest via separated screen/
section, displacing the complexity from the one
place to another.

20. • We can combine all 4 or we can use
one as a primary strategy
• There is no universal solution. Best
result is to adapt of current problem and
try to find optimal solution

21. The same techniques are applicable
for developers too!

22. Build
Measure
Learn

23. Basic steps: 1 2 3
ELIMINATE UNCERTAINTY
Create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously. Putting a process, a
methodology around the development of a product
!
WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER
The question is not "Can this feature be built?" Instead, the questions are "Should
this feature be built?"
!
DEVELOP AN MVP
The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then
developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as
quickly as possible.
!
VALIDATED LEARNING
When you focus on figuring the right thing to build-the thing customers want and
will pay for-you need not spend months waiting for a product beta launch to change
the company's direction.

24. Project cycle in IMVU
Social Entertainment Company
more than 100 million users

25. Project Cycle in Intuit (7 days long)
Thursday Create several A/B tests
Friday Release of the tests
Weekend Run tests
Monday Read the results
Tuesday Rebuild new tests
Project cycle in Intuit Inc.
Social Entertainment Company
TurboTax product

26. • Find Design Issues Early
• Iterate More Quickly on a Design Concept
• Compare Design Variations Quickly
• Gather Design Feedback Better
• Be Able to Perform User Testing Early On
• Prototypes Encourage Collaboration
• Designs Are Increasingly Becoming More Complex
• Prototypes Give You a Visual Guide to the Finished Product
• Prototyping is Cheap, Fast, and Easy
Prototypes a.k.a. Storyboards
Advantages

30. Behaviour Driven
Development (BDD)
Software development methodology that
takes an outside-in approach to describe
application behaviour by encouraging
intense customer involvement

31. What that means?
• Instead of writing tests we should think
of specifying behavior. Behavior is how
the user wants the application to behave.
• When our development is Behavior-
driven, we will always start with the
piece of functionality that’s most
important to user.

32. BDD User Stories
User stories are the central axis around which a software
project rotates.
User stories provide the unit of effort that project
management uses to plan and to track progress.
Estimations are made against user stories, and user
stories are where software design begins. User stories
help to shape a system’s usability and user experience.
User stories express requirements in terms of
The Role,
The Goal, and
The Motivation.

33. • The Role - manager, employee, customer
• The Goal - what user want to do
(purchasing, or ordering, or paying a bill)
• The Motivation - Statement which
provides some insight into a user’s
reasonable expectation for how the
feature or function that satisfies the story
may work.

34. A/B Testing
Commonly used in web & mobile
development, online marketing, and other
forms of advertising to describe simple
randomised experiments with two variants,
A and B, which are the control and
treatment in the controlled experiment.
Learning from users

40. Analytics + AB testing
• Smarter interface - Better UX
• Final destination: Native UI
Application knows user behaviour and
adapt to meet his needs
(reminder for clock in, suggestion for
choosing colleagues for shift trading..)

41. Conclusion
• Learn about users
• Make product simpler (start from small screens first)
• Make smaller batches of work and faster iterations
• Intensively use of A/B testing
• Use analytics to make UI smarter (Native UI)
• Accelerate changed based on valid (tested) results
• Create sustainable process of constant improving
product

42. Workshop
Real life example:
Sessions Module

43. Sprint overview
Defining user stories Sending notifications (Backend)
Research technology Saving messages (Backend)
Storyboards Saving messages (Client side)
Clickable Storyboards : Prototypes Creating groups (Client side)
Making UI Creating groups (Server side)