Vivek Prahlad shares his experiences on the differences and similarities between building software in the Product and Project contexts. At ThoughtWorks, he has spent approximately half of his career on the product side, and the other half on the consulting side. While the underlying principles are similar, there are often significant differences in terms of approaches that work for products and projects. Some of the differences we'll explore include: product vs. project inception, engineering considerations, testing approaches and strategies, course corrections, and more.

1. Product vs Project
Vivek Prahlad

2. My Background

3. ThoughtWorker for 8.5 years

4. Roughly half my time between
Projects and Products

5. Tech lead

6. Agile Coach

7. Project manager

8. Product manager

9. Author of Frankenstein

10. Tech lead of Twist

12. So

13. Does agile work for Products?

14. Yes

15. Can you conceptualize, build and market Products
from India?

16. Yes

17. Outsourcing should really be a four letter word.

18. U10g?

19. Before we begin

20. A few definitions

21. Project

22. Building software in (potentially) multiple releases

23. Support and evolution

24. Internal or External customers

25. Customers represented by Business Analysts,
Domain experts

26. Goals?

27. Build something that solves a problem
(or problems)

28. Secondary goals

29. Improve skills

30. Product?

31. Multiple releases

32. Functionality with each release

33. Invariably external users

34. Customers represented by Product Managers,
Business Analysts

35. Goals?

36. Build something useful / valuable

37. Lines can be blurred

38. Would building a search engine be a product or
project?

39. In my experience

40. Working on a product is a superset of project
activities

41. Development activities roughly similar

42. Getting started

43. Business Plan

44. Inception

45. Business AND technical risk

46. Validating the business plan

47. Market research

48. Surveys

49. Analysts

50. Domain experts

51. Team composition

52. Development strategy

53. Addressing technical debt

54. Growing estimates?

55. Stability issues?

56. Testing strategy

57. Tests are a valuable asset

58. Problem:

59. Test execution time grows linearly

60. Solution?

61. Tools like Test load balancer can help split your test
suite

62. Documentation?

63. Best handled as a part of a development

64. Documentation part of source control

65. Everything that changes part of source control

66. Demo scripts

67. Presentations

68. Usability testing results

69. Additional activities

70. Demos

71. Support

72. Feature requests and feedback

73. Usability testing

74. Planned capacity for these activities

75. Gotchas and Pitfalls

76. ‘Role bleed’

77. Getting the Architecture / Platform wrong

78. Not responding to feedback fast enough

79. Thank You!

80. Q &A