SpringOne Platform 2016 Speakers: Jim Thomson; Product Manager, Pivotal. Alex Basson; iOS Developer, Pivotal. Josh Franklin; Product Designer, Pivotal Have you been the engineer blocked on shipping a feature because you were waiting on Design to "figure it out"? Or wondered why you’re building a particular feature, or have your own ideas for the product vision? Have you been the designer who spent days designing an interaction only to find out it couldn't be built, or the PM trying to bridge the divide? It's time to take down those silo walls! Josh Franklin, Alex Basson, and Jim Thomson – a designer, an engineer, and a PM, respectively, will give a "Balanced Talk" on their successes and failures building the Small Token iOS app, and share the tactics they used to stay aligned as an Agile team and continuously learn from each other. Extended Description On traditional product teams, engineering, business, and design often sit in their own, walled-off silos.The “business” (usually a product owner) generally defines large swaths of requirements, chucks them over a wall to designers, who chuck designs back to the business, who package it up and chuck it over to the developers and ask how long it’ll take to deliver. They request features and designs with no regard to implementation, and engineers don’t have any input or view into the “what” or “why” of product and design decisions. There’s a better way! At Pivotal, we form “Balanced Teams,” made up of developers, a product manager, and a designer. For many reasons, a Balanced Team leads to better products and happier team members. In this talk, a balanced team of Engineer, Designer, and PM use real-world examples from our work on Small Token, a charitable giving iOS app, to illustrate specific advantages of working as a balanced team. We show how our practice here at Pivotal contrasts to a “traditional” product development cycle - and why it works. We expect the audience to learn techniques they can take home to their own product teams. They will be better empowered to evangelize for, and fully take advantage of, Agile principles. Specifically, engineers in the audience will learn that they can have an important voice in the direction of a product.

1. SpringOne 08.02.16
With Alex, Jim, and Josh
abasson@pivotal.io jathomson@pivotal.io jfranklin@pivotal.io
Tales from a Balanced Team

2. Balanced Team Values
Create Trust Share Experiments Celebrate Failure Diverse Voices

3. About Pivotal Labs
● Small, multi-disciplinary teams (Product Manager, Engineers, Product Designer)
from Pivotal and Clients
● Projects are both execution and enablement, we teach and work fast!
● Clients work on-site with us
● Cross discipline pairing
● User centered design (user interviews, personas, experiments, synthesis)
● All these things combined make us great agile/lean teams

4. The Project
Small Token app

5. The Client
Give Lively - a nonprofit looking to change the way
people give. This was their first product.

6. The Problem
As our world becomes more materialistic, how might
we create a simple and instant way for givers to
express gratitude in a more meaningful way?

7. The Project
Give Lively and Pivotal developed an application
called Small Token that makes it easy and quick to
give a donation to a nonprofit on behalf of someone
you care about.

9. Product Manager Designer Engineers Client PM Stakeholders
The Team
1 1 4 1 2

10. The Timeline
Research
Kickoff
Sep. 29th, 2015
Development
Kickoff
Oct. 13th, 2015
MVP Launch
Giving Tuesday
Dec. 1st, 2015
Milestone 1
Gift Customization
Dec. 16st, 2015
Milestone 2
Photo Customization
Jan. 13st, 2016
Disengagement
Jan. 22nd, 2016
8 weeks

11. Balanced Tales

12. Collaborative Research
During our research phase, engineers,
designers and PM’s participated in user
interviews and synthesis sessions. This
allowed us all to gain more empathy for
end users and insight that helped suggest
tech solutions and platforms.

13. The people who do the research are those that build the
product.
UNBALANCED
Research may be done outside of the project, and team
members may not participate
BALANCED

14. “Minimum Approvable Product”
David, our Client PM, had done research in
the App Store guidelines, and was aware of
a special rule requiring charity apps to
accept payment outside of the app. But
guidelines are vague.
This prompted us to create a “Minimum
Approvable Product” to submit as early as
possible to ensure our app would be
approved.

15. Business and Tech Concerns are Intertwined
UNBALANCED
Tech decisions follow business decisions
BALANCED

16. Diversity of knowledge is shared
UNBALANCED
Knowledge is siloed
BALANCED

17. Sketching Studio
We did a sketching/design studio during
our Discovery and Framing process after
identifying key users and working through
scenarios. This helped us collectively arrive
at a MVP workflow for giving a gift that
incorporated UI ideas from across the
team.

18. All members of the team are given an opportunity to provide
design ideas
UNBALANCED
Designers pitch mocks over the wall to implement
BALANCED

19. Story Time
For every project we meet as a team once
a week to discuss prioritization of stories.
On a few occasions, design set aside time
to pair with the Pivotal PM and client PM on
writing stories and fleshing out acceptance
criteria.

20. All team members have input into how features are broken
down into stories, and their priority
UNBALANCED
Business decisions drive requirements, and their priority,
without regard for complexity or user value
BALANCED

21. Design/Dev Pair
Throughout the project there were times
where it was necessary for design and
engineering to pair on complex user flows.
For example, Alex approached me one
afternoon about some unknown complexity
with cropping photos within the app. The
next afternoon we spent a few hours pairing
together in xcode spiking the cropping
interaction for multiple screen sizes.

22. Everyone has a responsibility for the success of the product,
so we work together as necessary to make it happen
UNBALANCED
Roles are typically siloed, and disciplines stick to their
sole responsibilities
BALANCED

23. Thanks!

24. ARCHIVE

25. Where to sign up?
Product and design had made a workflow
decision about account registration. A
developer raised an important concern about
this decision’s impact on payment
conversion. We immediately broke out as a
team to discuss the implications of this
decision on product, design and technology.
?

26. Take-away
All team members should feel empowered to influence product,
design, and development decisions.