“ImaWakatta is a Japanese language learning site where all learning content is created by qualified Japanese teachers.”
How does a new product idea typically make its way from concept to development in your team?
Typically an idea originates from user feedback or from within our team. Our team is very small, so the idea can be quickly discussed without too much process or overhead. From there, the details go into Trello and the developer will pick it up.
What's the most challenging part of turning ideas into actionable work?
Just making sure our limited time is spent on building the right things for our learners.
Where do requirements, assumptions, or decisions most often get lost or misunderstood?
There is always a non-technical-people / technical-people boundary. What may seem simple is complex to develop or vice-versa.
What's a recent example of a feature or project that changed significantly during development? What caused the change?
We have the concept of stories and lessons. Stories are typically read by users after they complete a handful of lessons, with the story text building upon the lesson content in those lead up lessons. Initially the plan was for the story to have links back to the lessons so the student could quickly revise the lesson content as needed. On desktop this was fine, but in mobile, the experience was jarring and hard to navigate back to the story. We made a last minute decision to show the lesson content in a bottom drawer that slides up from the bottom. This keeps the student in the context of the story. This change was significant from a development perspective, because these inlined lessons needed to consider things like preloading, auth/access, hiding interactive content within the lesson and so on.
How does your team capture and share product context today?
Primarily Google Drive and Trello
If you could instantly improve one part of your product development process, what would it be?
We're still fine tuning our ios deployment pipelines, and maturing the approach to handling users that haven't updated to the latest app version.
What advice would you give founders building products with small teams?
Always put the user first. Actually use your product. Minimise process.
Capture product context the way these teams wish they could
Decisions, questions, and reasoning — connected from discussion to delivery.
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