How a Product Goes from Concept to Reality

What is a Product?

A Product is a feature or set of features that " enhance the customer experience. The customer can be either a HauteLook member, an employee or an outside vendor. The features can be anything from changing a line of copy or color of a button to entire new lines of business, such as Daily Deals and Gift Cards.

Who works on a Product?

The Team that works on a product can " vary from one to the next The core Team that will always work on a product is:
Product Management Development Quality Assurance (QA)

In addition there might be:

Database Architect User Experience (UX) Design Graphical User Interface (UI) Design Release Engineer

Product Management Team - mission

Our mission is to create features and experiences that delight

members, generate revenue and value, and position HauteLook as the leader in our space.

Building products and features to support many stakeholders..

Execu3ves

Members

Brand Sales

Product Manager
Opera3ons Marke3ng

Member Care

Technology

The Extended Team " and Process

Opera3ons/Finance

Cross dept impacts? Changes to process or admin system needed?

Design

Produce designs and mockups, consult on UE

Execu3ves

Brand Sales

Members

PR/Brand Posi3oning

Product Manager
Opera3ons Marke3ng

Product Manager
Member Communica3ons

Member Care

Technology

Posi:oning with members, with press Separate email announcement? Inclusion in daily email or Sunday newsle?er?

Development

QA

Technical build Build tes:ng, regression tes:ng, cross plaBorm tes:ng (iPhone, iPad, mobile, Facebook)

The process:

1. Running list of ideas 2. Roughly es3mate level of eort needed 3. Review details with execs as needed for signo 4. Execu3ve priori3za3on of ini3a3ves 5. Compe33ve analysis, design explora3on, wireframes 6. Marke3ng and communica3ons plan 7. Product Specica3ons Documents as needed 8. User stories (JIRA) 9. Mockups 10. Marke3ng plan 11. Development cycles/sprints 12. QA tes3ng on six dierent opera3ng systems and seven dierent browsers, resul3ng in ~30 dierent congura3ons: OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7. Mac OS 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 Browsers: IE 6, 7, 8. Safari 4, 5. Chrome 6. Firefox 3.6. 13. Release planning/training 14. Release to produc3on 15. Post release monitoring

Sample Design Project UI (user interface) Heavy

All CAPS in nav

Teal accent color

Upcoming Events hidden

A lot of repea3ng informa3on

In general: Heavy visual blocks both in nav and on main page Too much visual noise Non standard naviga3on to Upcoming Events

New User Interface!

Improvements to Design, IA (information architecture) and navigation

Sofer visual design and introduc3on of green accent color New bugon design across site Removal of brand logos on heroes and % o Added short event descrip3on New simpler nav and saluta3on (Welcome) Upcoming sale events calendar displayed without clicking Introduced hierarchy of newest events versus events ending soon

Agile Development Manifesto

We follow the Agile Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Simply put, we want to eliminate roadblocks and be exible to get things done faster.

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Products Come in Different Sizes

Really big Products (large sets of features) require our quarterly corporate prioritization, where the executive team decides in what order they should be worked on. Products of this size follow a development process called SCRUM. Smaller Products (single features or small sets of related features) are prioritized weekly by your peers who suggested their own products. Products of this size follow a process called Kanban

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SCRUM
Comes from a Rugby term for this: Basic idea is a team working closely together to advance the product development in small incremental moves Divide the product into smaller pieces that can be done in ~2 weeks (called a Sprint) and released to the world after each sprint Meet daily in a room to ensure progress is continuing as planned

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Kanban

Japanese for Card Board Originally a manufacturing process from laying out individual tasks that something must ow through Applied to software development to follow the steps that any feature must take to get completed and released Each item must be able to ow individually across the board

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Our Basic Flow of Software Development

Product Design

Development

Quality Assurance

User Acceptance Tes3ng

Release

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Development
First a group of developers meet to " have an engineering discussion and" decide what needs to be built and " generally how to do it If it requires new data to be stored, we have to bring in our database architect to design what the storage of data will look like There is then two levels of development that occurs:
Service Layer
How the data is accessed, business logic is applied and delivered in raw form

View Layer
What the end user sees and how they interact with the data

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Quality Assurance
Just as important as building something is" ensuring it works for all usage QA Engineers will work with the Product Managers " to understand all the requirements and write a " Test Plan A Test Plan is made up of Test Cases which are all of the different ways something can be interacted and the different data input They test for both good cases (the correct data was input) and bad cases (the incorrect data was input, and therefore an error should show) If possible the tests are automated to be run again and again Once all known test cases are passed the product is approved
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User Acceptance Testing

QA came up with all of the technical tests, " but does it actually look and feel right? User Acceptance Testing is done by Product to" make sure that it does The Look is the layout, font, colors, and images used The Feel is the way buttons and elds and the page reacts when used When this is passed as matching the original design, then the product is nally approved for release

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Release
Release is the process of getting the new " code and assets (images, fonts) out into the world for the customer to see the product A release engineer does a process called a build where the code is packaged up and pushed out to our servers (approximately 250) The assets are then pushed out to our Content Delivery Network (Akamai) who hosts them as close to the end user as possible as these are the larger download pieces and that closeness means time savings Once the build is done and assets are pushed, the developer and QA will Certify the release that it is working as intended

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Follow-Up

Almost as important as the product release " itself is the follow-up We will look at analytical data on the usage, " get customer feedback and determine if the product release met the needs of the customer If additional modications are needed, a post-release cycle will occur to resolve any bugs or enhancements

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A/B Test
In some cases the product change is tested" to see whether it is actually an improvement This is called an A/B or Multivariate test (A) is the control group that gets the original experience, whereas (B) or even (C) will get a different experience being tested Analytics are compared throughout the length of the test to nd the winner (the one that performed the best) The winner is the one that is released to all, and/or another test is started

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