June 2020 - PathCheck weekly product sync

Owned by Brad Peters
Last updated: Jun 22, 2020
6 min read

link to recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/108Ri96i8dweWlMMK5kP_HW8d2tHIUucj/view

Kyle:

  • MVP 1 to app store today with new branding

  • Tetons is getting ready to test the app (TestFlight / APKs)

  • Shareef has both Haiti and Tetons ready to go as HAs

  • Several universities lining up to buy into a Uni MVP product, with the Roadmap reflecting the changes in priorities.

Spectra:

Reframing our goals to provide more transparency and assurance to the rest of the organization and increase clarity within the production team.

We are also going to implement some interesting tools to centralize the workspace and empower knowledge retention

  • John Kane: I just emailed a big group of people to work on Gemini / Apollo – whatever the new process is for the small teams, I want to be sure I am communicating that to these new people and what those timeframe goals are – they are going to need more work items as well.

    • Spectra: please keep me in the loop; a lot of the pilots are exploratory in nature, so we’ll have to develop those work items as we go.

 

 Jennifer Schnidman

  • Last week focus was on finishing MVP1 and navigating two competing priorities for release

  • This week – to get the marketing-focused release ready to ship over the next 3-4 hours (clean up issues)

  • Once MPV1 ships, we’ll continue to move the GPS app forward, kicking off our first Mercury sprint (fast follows, remaining MVP 1 work)

  • no blocks

 

Bob Mallon

  • GAEN in TestFlight for Minn and Guam, still no working GAEN server yet, getting closer though on iOS and ~2 weeks behind that with Android

 

Brian Ng

  • Last week – onboarding, meetings, wrapping up secondary research on HAs

  • This week – discovery call with some HA people later today

 

Emma Heizer

  • last week – shifting focus to uni conversation (TCU, SMU) sketched out a prototype there

  • working with Ali and Stephen to generate user stories

  • conversation about Uni scoping later

  • enriching the Uni prototype

 

Ali

  • later today meeting with some of the Thoughtbot designers to make sure they're ready to go

  • call with others re: discovery pieces, s/term l/term with both GPS and GAEN

  • some meetings with Stephen and Otto providing more context around SafePlaces design

 

Ranna

  • we did our TCU call last week – good job Emma on the prep for that call

  • presenting to a round table to 10-15 other Unis and lockdown our pilot MVP features.  *Uni’s care a lot about the customization of their announcements

 

Stephen

  • onboarding / knowledge transfer

  • sprint for Place pretty well worked out

  • what identity mgt for smaller HAs looks like

  • names faces and roles

 

Vince

  • Moved our Beta to Monday, having some issues with the GPS logging in iOS, trying to finish that off, trying to move our host installation faster

 

xian:

  • there was some idea that there is some CT training on the way, but there is really just an onboarding video on the way –

    • Vince: the training had to do with CTrs working with just Places, Places and the Paths, and just Paths, etc.

  • helping to get the MVP1 submitted

  • trying to keep the wheels on – trying to keep people engaged with the new processes

 

Spectra:

  • Question for the group: how useful are the (daily) / weekly standups? Maybe there is a more economical way to do this asynchronously? DM me with any thoughts you may have about this.

Mon 6/15/2020

Link to recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OW475r9jgOE53pZnFP3os9qSJIOUNl4E/view

  • Kyle:

    • We’ve created this weekly product update rhythm (Mondays, 1pm EDT) with the goal of educating the broader PathCheck company of what the tech group is doing. 

    • We are continuing to build squads around specific features over the next few days.  Spectra is going to be finalizing that effort this week. 

    • Jennifer will be running the community member squad, understanding that we are reprioritizing university concerns as the focus of this next phase and will need to adjust release time frames for 2-3 weeks out on the community member piece.

  • Spectra:

    • We need a better connection between the product team and new customer questions and requirements.  Maybe an Airtable or a phone call between Implementation and Product after a new customer is onboarded?  Will discuss further with Jeff Kushmerek. 

  • Jeff Kushmerek:

    • There is a need for documentation for new customers to help them understand what they will need to do to be successful with our products.  A discussion with Sam Zimmerman was started to address this, with the understanding that some sales type functionality is needed even if the cost of the products is $0. 

Mon 6/8/2020

  • Welcome to Michael Kielstra who is leading the student implementation effort

  • Kyle:

    • Product Roadmapping

    • Most epics should have Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) with them, and should be created in Jira. Jennifer and Omar are going to continue organizing the Mercury Jira board.

      • Ali: we also have a cold-start challenge within HAs. How should we prioritize that? Kyle: I think there is a lot of overlap with the community cold-start challenge, and where there is not, we have a much more direct feedback loop with them.

      • We need to divide up the tasks for Mercury, how best can we do that?

        • Christian: we need people to ask for pieces that they are really interested in, but also work on finding gaps and assigning / recruiting people to cover the list.

        • Jennifer: the Rocket way would be to take a design first approach, going off of rapid prototypes. In Mercury, we have fewer epics than MVP#1, so where possible, we should have fewer PMs working on each theme.

        • Emma: we can also expand the user research to better define our design prototypes. *

        • We need to follow a two prong approach: 1) people who are available, come up with what they would like to work on (top 3), better own one thing thoroughly and 2) we need to watch the whole thing and keep an eye for where we can recruit / assign.

Mon 6/1/2020

Happy June

  • Welcome to Jeff Kushmerek who will be focusing on program management

  • Welcome to Brad Peters, a PM / UX intern on the project

  • Recent discussions about “Mercury Priorities” (Ranna)

    • MVP1 what would make external stakeholders more comfortable using the product

    • “Mercury” will focus on getting more HAs involved, cold start problem (“Why should I use this if no one else is using it?”), buy-in w/ community members (esp. those who are HA free) by building personal value in the app (things it can do for you as a singular user) [link to confluence prod doc]

  • RICE style prioritization

    • Reach - how many people do you want as users “99999”

    • Impact - rated 1-low to 3-high through discussion with the project personnel and research

    • Confidence - how confident in the Reach and Impact factors

    • Effort - What can / should be put into the effort

    • Link to Mercury feature evaluation table: https://pathcheck.atlassian.net/wiki/x/-4C7BQ

 

Previous Meeting Notes

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c8ZRnrjq0Y7ws3JLzxOVGe8NKgg-TqQGAdt-RxM9S14/edit#