Talk by our CTO Jesper Richter-Reichhelm from the Unicon 2018

1. Lessons Learned
While Building Products
Jesper Richter-Reichhelm
CTO at Outfittery
@jrirei
With annotations!

2. –Common Wisdom
“Having a good idea is the most important thing to have.”
I disagree!

3. –Guy Kawasaki
“A good idea is about ten percent and
implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent”
I agree - mostly!
This talk is
about adjusting
the luck factor…

4. Jesper Richter-Reichhelm
• Studied Informatik at TU Berlin
• Tried to overthrow a government - it failed
• Founded 4 companies - they all failed
• 7 years suffering as consultant for banks
• 5 years learning at Jamba
• 7 years building up Wooga
• 1+ years transforming Outfittery
Lessons in this
talk come from
the last 3 jobs.

5. Lessons Learned …
• … while building products from scratch
• … while building a new product for an existing platform
• … while improving an existing product

6. Building Products from Scratch
Lesson
learned while
making games at
Wooga

7. The Game Outcomes Projects
• Survey of 120 questions
• Development factors: teamwork, culture, production, project management
• Outcome: ROI, delays, critics, internal goals
• 273 completed game projects
Check out
http://bit.ly/
GameOutcomesProject

8. The Game Outcomes Project
… success
factors and
project outcome.
There is a
strong correlation
between …

9. The Game Outcomes Project: Methodology
And doing
“agile” is not one
of them!
“But it’s simply not there.
It seems that in spite of all the attention
paid to the subject, the particular type of
production methodology a team uses is not
terribly important, and it is not a significant
driver of outcomes. Even the much-
maligned “Waterfall” approach can
apparently be made to work well.“
Quote: “So it’s very clear that where
there were significant drivers of project
outcomes, they stood out very clearly. Our
results were not shy. And if the specific
production methodology a team uses is really
vitally important, we would expect that it
absolutely should have shown up in the
outcome correlations as well.”

10. The Game Outcomes Project
… and
their correlation
to a positive
outcome!
Typical
questions
(answered using
a range) …

11. The Game Outcomes Project: Vision
The two most
relevant success
factors!

12. Wooga game teams
FE Dev
BE Dev
Art
Product
My
experience from
making games at
Wooga:

13. Wooga game teams100+ game
teams, each
making their own
product!
… which
became large in
production.
Small team for
early concepts…

14. A Team with a vision
Positive
example of a
team with a
vision!
Latest hit from
Wooga.

15. –My lesson learned
“Provide a strong vision to align your team!”
I’ve seen the
difference it
makes…

16. Building a new Product for an Existing Platform
Lesson
learned while
working at
Jamba

17. Jamba
A loooong time
ago…

18. Jamba
A loooong time
ago…

19. Jamba Full Track Music: The Vision
We had a clear
vision…
We even had
specific specs for
all 40 pages.

20. The Setup
• Lot’s of tech debt in the platform
• The next big thing!
• Dedicated project team
• Innovate tech stack!
• DELIVER! NOW!
• Team size doubled after delays
Hint: Large
team size was
one of the
problems!

21. The Problem(s)
• Everything was new:
• New data structures
• New services
• New architecture
• LOTs of widgets to create
• No one knew what to do (first)
• Everybody had great advice
• LOTs of meetings
• Nothing was (really) delivered

22. And every day we saw this:

23. Then the project manager had an idea…

24. Then the project manager had an idea: Yellow pages
Concentrate on a
true MVP first!

25. Then the project manager had an idea: Yellow pages
This reduced
complexity so
much…!

26. The Solution: MVP called “Yellow pages”
• Only 10/50 widgets
• No ext. services
• Only 4/20 developers
• Solve technical issues with small team
• Gain trust by delivering value
• Train other developers
• Slowly (!) increase team again
• Build everything via multiple milestones … we started
to deliver value
after 2-3 weeks.
After being
“stuck” for
months…

27. We finally could deliver the product…
It failed later
for other reasons
… :-)

28. –My lesson learned
“Provide focus on what is most important!”
This is much
harder than it
seems.

29. Improving an Existing Product
Lesson
learned while
working at
Outfittery

30. Outfittery “funnel”
Journey for a
new customer…

31. Outfittery: Initial setup
• Web team responsible for “the funnel”
• Conversion not good enough
• LOTs of advice with “obvious" solutions
• 4 developers working on three different project streams
• One of those streams was even called “speed boat”
Hint: Shield and
enable your team

32. Providing focus first
• Designers into the same room
• All developers work on the same project
• Protect the team against outside attempts to influence
• Problem still remains: How to fix the (product problem)?

33. Then the product manager took over control
• Keep calm
• Rationalise decision making
• Accept uncertainties and address them directly
• Formulating hypotheses
• User testing in-house
• AB tests to measure impact, double down if something looks promising
With data you
reduce (bad)
discussions

34. Example of Hypothesis-driven development
• “Users do not understand the benefits or what to expect from Outfittery”
• Service Summary Page
• Explain Billing Address
• Revise Copy (multiple variations)
• Test those hypotheses one by one
• Explanation of first test results lead to further hypotheses to test

35. Hypothesis-driven development in action
Excerpt from a
roadmap

36. Hypothesis-driven development in action
Example
evaluation of an
hypothesis

37. –My lesson learned
“Hypotheses are great to battle uncertainty.”
Whereas
requirements
don’t help with
that.

38. Lessons Learned

39. These practices strengthen each other
Vision Focus
Hypotheses-driven
development
Vision makes it
easier to focus!
Focus helps with
development!
Hypotheses
confirm vision - or
the opposite!

40. –My advice
“Provide vision and focus to your team -
use hypotheses to battle uncertainty!”
Just my 0.02 USD

41. Questions?
Jesper Richter-Reichhelm (@jrirei)
https://outfittery.de/jobs