Project management map

Updated August 29, 2018

If you don't have a proper project manager, you could do worse than to fill in the blanks in this punchlist. It's useful to have resources lined up to solve these problems.

  • Strategy, research
    • Who do we think our customer is? What is their job-to-be-done?
    • Strategy research
    • Competitive analysis
    • Lean business canvas Lean canvas
    • User interviews
    • Field research
    • Market segments (for established product categories),
    • Trend-spotting research (for fashion)
    • Futures forecasting (pdf reports), ScenarioPlanning, for startups.
  • Kickoff, framing
    • Exploration, scoping (pdf reports)
    • Project brief (client services)
    • Branding guidelines (if any preexisting brand)
  • Customer stories, user stories, job stories
    • Job Stories
    • User Stories
  • Design Hypothesis
  • Sitemap
  • Wireframes
    • Information architecture
  • User testing
    • Keynote interactive, etc
  • Prototypes (test design hypothesis)
    • More User Testing
    • Loop back to Design Hypothesis
    • Make as many loops as necessary, each one should resolve risks and move you closer to finding product-market fit.
  • Moodboards
  • Interaction design, graphic design, motion design
  • Styleguide
  • Asset sharing and versioning (Drive? GH? Something else?)

Brand

  • Brand guidelines
  • Copy guidelines/voice
  • Brand colors
  • Applications

Frontend Development

  • Mobile or web or something else?
  • UI framework/toolkit React Elm
  • Build tooling Rollup Babel
  • Integration testing Selenium

User Research

  • Automated (tool needed)
  • Customer feedback in-app (tool needed)
  • Metrics
  • Analytics

Backend Development

  • REST API
  • Database structure
  • Scaling/sharding/replication, Serverless
  • Security/authentication/oAuth
  • CDN/asset server
  • Payments
  • Real-time communication Websockets
  • Unit tests

DevOps, Release engineering, release management

Release engineering:

  • Farm out as much devops as possible by using serverless, AWS, etc

Release management:

  • Build scripts
  • Nightly builds
  • Continuous Integration TravisCI

Development process:

  • Code peer review
  • Someone else lands your code. Better yet, a bot. See the not rocket science rule
  • Git branching strategy. Train model or master must always be deployable
  • Automate everything: build bots, merge bots, CI bots

Documentation

  • Wikis are an excellent way to capture institutional knowledge, but require buy-in from a critical mass of the team. Making them a habit is key.
    • Dokuwiki is pretty good. MoinMoin is spam-prone. Team documentation wiki
  • Markdown files in a GitHub repo can function as a pretty good documentation hub. Leverage the GitHub pull request workflow.
  • https://usecanvas.com/

Building a Team

Project management

  • Kanban Trello
  • Communication Slack or IRC, but be sure to implement team scrollback server for your channels.
  • Automate as much grunt-work as possible with bots

Meetings:

  • Daily standup
  • Weekly Retrospective
  • 1:1 meetings

Avoiding the morass:

Teams need special breaks with routine to stay sharp. Otherwise you get stuck wandering in the wilderness. Tools:

  • Work week
  • Milestones
  • Sprints

Remote:

  • Google Hangouts
  • Etherpad
  • https://usecanvas.com/
  • Slack

Community

  • Forum Discourse
  • RFC

Programming, Development, Project Management