Thanks to everyone who attended the meetup! We started off with an exercise to demonstrate why collaboration is more effective than documentation (and sub-sequent handoffs of said documentation). During the first part of the exercised that was document driven, 2 and half of 6 customers accepted the product. I say ‘half’ because one of the customer said “I dunno, well, kinda, yeah, I guess it’s ok“. During the second half where we demonstrated collaboration over written documentation, 5 of 6 customers accepted the product! Collaboration FTW!
We then moved onto visualization techniques for product discovery. We talked about using story-maps, videos and mind-maps for quickly setting context for your team and enabling a collaborative environment for your team to work in.
These are some of the tools and links to other articles based on our discussions.
Tools:
JIRA w/Greenhopper: Great tool for managing work, Greenhopper plugin (which is now standard with JIRA) adds “Agile stuff” like task boards, burn-downs (release and sprints) and more.
Balsamiq: wireframing tool. Lets you create clickable PDF mockups to do full usability testing without writing any code.
Story Mapper: Plugin for Pivotal Tracker for creating story-maps
Other Links and Resources:
Agile Product Design: Jeff Patton created the concept of story-maps, his site has tons of information about story mapping, prototyping and more.
Paper Prototyping Video: Great video showing paper prototyping with links to a whole bunch of other videos