2018-12-13 Retrospective - Community Portals
- Meredith Slota (Unlicensed)
- Sara Gosline (Unlicensed)
Background
The "community portal" product team is a cross-functional group with members from the platform and scientific teams. After working on two portal prototypes for two months, and shipping versions of both live, it seems useful to check in and examine our working practices and see where we need to make tweaks moving forward.
Retrospective
What Worked
Launched! On time! Deadlines met!
Issues were filed (Jira)
Issue clarity was ok
Flexibility - chance coure, iterative
Cautious with feature creep despite speed
Realistic deadlines / deliverables / scope
Kept the customer in mind
group_concat shipped
ANONYMOUS ACCESS TO DATA
Priorities:
- Everyone had a voice, was a leader
- Good listening
- Good communication, triage
- Good discussions
No overreach in scope
"Not under the gun"
Clear ownership / shared responsibility
Clarified was "next level" CMS might be: wikis > structured content > schemas
Dogfood worked! Using "explore" to find errors in data
What Could Be Better
Jira workflows - validation / closed
- Comments used for status
- Confusion over "shipping"
- What is "done"?
What are "versions"? - dates for v1, v2 NF are unclear
NO ROADMAP BY SPRINT
- design vs. dev happening / overlapping
- Gantt chart for project?
- difficult to estimate LOE + dev time
NO TIME FOR FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
- what even is a data portal for?
- tools / products not aligned to key scenarios
Difficult to cut "explore" from NF
Not owning the story
- Product messaging, no communication channels externally
- Partial project for AMP-AD caused confusion
Ownership between Anna / Meredith - some gaps, some overlap
Didn't walk through whole user process / main scenarios
- Uncovered technical risk re: tables / download LATE
- Who owns QA? unclear and confusing
BIG PICTURE IS UNCLEAR - how do portals + Synapse work?
- Messaging to internal folks vs. partners
Too much power given to partners (e.g. URLs, naming)
No documentation of discussions causing churn
Design changed over time but files disorganized, out-of-date
- No single source of truth about what we're building
SPF for components - risk and stressor
- Want more time for testing
- Artificial divide between MB + Synapse engineers
Lack of focus on stabilizing components
Not enough wiggle room in ship dates
| Start doing | Stop doing | Keep doing |
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Action Items
- Meredith to schedule working group meeting to tackle dev workflows / shipping processes
- Anna to convene "portals working group" to set 6-month objectives for portals
Team to bid goodbye to Michael Barakat (Unlicensed) on January 11th as he leaves us for greener pastures- as a result
Whiteboard Photos
What Worked
What Could Be Better
