foreword
When it comes to pea pods , many people may think of the white and fat founder Wang Junyu at first , and then it may be the words "Silicon Valley fan" and "geek fan".
As the earliest, most well-known and relatively successful project invested by the innovative factory, Wandoujia has been in everyone's eyes from beginning to end, and gradually changed from a dozen people to dozens of people, and now more than 100 people. In the case of the gradual increase of team members, the efficiency has not decreased. 15 million application downloads per day and more than 150 million users have achieved this with just over 100 people and 3 cats. From this data point of view, the efficiency is not high.
So how is this efficient behind it? Wang Junyu once shared how to use tools to improve team productivity at the innovation conference at the beginning of the year of Geek Park ( text version ), but did not elaborate on how to use these tools and how to use these tools to cooperate with the team. Therefore, Geek Park visited three team members with different positions in the Wandoujia team (product designer Zhang Tao, development engineer Ding Jichang, and Wen Zhenhua, who is in charge of operations) to understand how to use these tools to work behind the team's high efficiency of. Some people may ask, why is there no product manager who is the most fancy in Geek Park? The answer is behind.
Tips: What we generally call Wandoujia actually refers to the first Android mobile assistant client called Wandoujia mobile phone wizard, while Wandou Lab is the name of the team, and Wandoujia (mobile phone wizard client) is its first product , as well as pea pod application search, pea pod treasure bag and washing white and other project products.
The structure of the pea pod team
Reorganized into a project system
To understand the workflow of a team, you must first understand the structure of the team. It may be different from what you think. The structure of the Wandoujia team is not a common departmental system, but a project system. This management structure was reorganized in June last year. The reason for the reorganization was that the previously adopted departmental matrix management system made the same designer or engineer responsible for multiple projects at the same time, which not only cost a lot of communication, but also made it difficult to coordinate scheduling priorities.
The process of the new project system is as follows. When a new project is determined, the corresponding design, development and operation personnel will be determined to temporarily form a project team. After the project is completed, the project team will be disbanded, and then reorganized to proceed to the next project or enter other projects (in the middle process, project members can also apply for transfer to other projects every 3 months).
no product manager
Another thing you might not expect is that Peapods does not have a dedicated product manager. When a project is formed, if the product of the project is design-led, the product designer will be in charge as a whole, and if the product of the project is development-led, the development engineer will take the lead. The lead is equivalent to the temporary product manager of the project.
Asked whether an engineer could be responsible for this role, Zhang Tao told Geek Park that in Wandoujia, many products were made by engineers themselves, including product prototypes, interface design, etc. Just now another engineer transferred from development to post. Product design, this is not the first case in Pea Pod. At the beginning of the year, Wang Junyu also mentioned in an interview with infoQ , "More than one Peadou has had the experience of switching between engineers and product designers."
After the basic understanding, let's take a look at the process of a project (from the beginning of design to development, testing, online, subsequent operations, and feedback iterations) to see how Wandoujia uses tools to increase work efficiency and reduce those "in order to be able to complete" work that needs to be done.”
product design
Early design
Through team brainstorming discussions, ideas are classified with sticky notes, and then classified as tasks one by one into the project management tool Asana , and assigned to the person in charge. In the future, this matter is only related to this person, and the follow-up progress and process will be understood and arranged through Asana's email notification. In addition, everyone can see all projects by default in Asana. If you want to follow up in real time like the person in charge, you can receive email reminders just by following to ensure transparency.
Since the reorganization into a project system, Wandoujia has tried different professional project management tools such as Basecamp , Jira and Asana, and finally chose Asana. In addition to recording and organizing brainstorming ideas, Asana is also used in all other projects of Wandoujia Management is the main line of teamwork.
Prototyping
Zhang Tao told us that the design process of pea pods is generally to produce high-fidelity prototypes directly, and less fidelity prototypes such as hand-painted or mockup are done. This can improve a lot of efficiency by reducing intermediate processes.
Most of the tools used are Photoshop (two designers used Axure before but they both abandoned them recently), but recently there is a trend of switching from Photoshop to Sketch , because Sketch solves many design pain points.
product development
The development progress management also uses Asana. As mentioned earlier, the development progress was managed through Excel when there were few people. Later, a tool similar to Microsoft Visio was used, but because it was bloated and could not track bugs, it was quickly being abandoned. Later, I turned to Jira, because Jira has good control over bug tracking and progress, and the distribution is relatively fine, and it can be coordinated uniformly. But it was later abandoned due to the high cost of use. Jira then started to try 37signals ' Basecamp, which was later abandoned due to unclear progress and slow speed.
Finally, I started to try Asana. At that time, Wandoujia was the first batch of users of Asana and the first one to completely switch the team to the Asana platform (the teams that are using now include Foursquare, Airbnb, DISQUS, etc.).
Continue the above process. When the design outputs a high-fidelity prototype, the specific details, including the size of each pixel, are written on the Google Docs document. The engineering team will follow up later. In this document The communication with the design is confirmed (there will be changes in the middle), and then the engineering team will also issue an implementation document similar to the design document. This document will give engineers and some technical experts a go through, generally point out what should be, what risks and problems may be faced in the middle, and give some technical guidance. Then there is the final Coding encoding. In the process of Coding, Asana is also used for management. When the functions are completed, just tick and choose to complete. After that, the engineer will receive a notification to confirm that this part has been completed. In the follow-up week, there will be a weekly meeting to review and review what problems encountered last week and determine what to do this week. The entire development process is like this.
Google Docs is the carrier of all documents in Wandoujia, another main line of collaboration outside Asana.
Product testing and release
The design and development of the above products are all around the line of Asana, and the subsequent product testing and product release are on the line of Wandou Labs, the tool system developed by Wandoujia .
Wandoujia has three products: Windows version, Web version and Andriod version. The release of each product is periodic, so Wandoujia has a team responsible for managing the release to control when these products should be released.
Wandou Labs will indicate the list of features to be released for each product, the time points for these features to be released, and the completion progress of the corresponding design development. Then the test team will test and review them one by one according to the feature list on Wandou Labs and the design draft and engineering draft on Google Docs. In order to ensure efficiency, before the test team conducts testing, the design and development side has already performed basic usage tests on the product, so the test team only does basic regression work.
The release of client (Windows, Android) products is relatively formal. The release team releases a report after the test and confirms that there are no first-level and second-level bugs. All responsible persons are called to hold a review meeting to discuss and confirm the functions of the product to be released. , product documentation, product BUG situation, release strategy, impact on server bandwidth after release, etc. If all are ok, the release will be confirmed, and the operation team will take over after release. If there is a new version of the web server, it will go through the unit test first to ensure that there will be no problems with major functions, and then test the important indicators, then roll back, and then go online (first online on the internal network and then on the external network).
All published documentation is also on Google Docs.
Product Operations
In the past, the design and development of products were managed by these internal people, so when the product was released, how did Wandoujia collect questions and opinions in the face of users with various ideas?
Demand feedback collection
In Wandoujia, Zendesk is used to deal with user and developer feedback and demand suggestions . For example, the user feedback of Wandoujia is embedded with Zendesk on the website help page . After users submit demand feedback, Zendesk will automatically converge to its website. On the platform and via email, users have reported feedback and explained what the problem is. The employees in charge of this area can directly reply to the user in addition to this requirement in the email, and then the user will receive a corresponding email reminder. Later, users can also update their feedback requirements by directly replying to the email, and the communication between Wandoujia and users (developers) can be realized completely through emails.
If the user's feedback is a product BUG, they can also get through the plugin on Zendesk and Jira, a tool specially responsible for tracking BUG, and then the engineer will receive a reminder and solve it. When the BUG is solved, the engineer will confirm on Jria that it has been solved. Then the system will automatically synchronize back to Zendesk and send an email to remind the user that the bug has been resolved (this part is the process when using Jria before).
In addition, Zendesk can also provide data reports including the number of feedback, feedback type, satisfaction, response time and user evaluation, etc., clearly reflecting how well each aspect is doing, and where there is room for improvement, etc.
In addition, when using Zendesk to process the feedback (ticket/work order) submitted by users, there is a tag statistics function, and then Zendesk will synchronize the tags to the data analysis report. When you get the data report, you will see that a tag is hit 10 times The above shows that this issue is more important. The operator will analyze and discuss it manually, and then ask the user's usage scenarios, compare other users, analyze and study the requirements, and then summarize the discussion results and discuss and decide with the team.
User Opinion Survey
When Wandoujia collects user needs, product feedback and user opinions and suggestions, it uses the domestic survey group . For example , in Mini Wandoujia, users can click "Chat with Wandou" at any time during use to open the feedback form directly in the software interface, and put forward their own questions and opinions to Wandoujia.
In addition, when the user uninstalls the Wandoujia software, the page will automatically jump to an uninstallation questionnaire ( supports pictures and HTML) , asking the user why he wants to uninstall the Wandoujia software. In addition to understanding why users uninstall the software, it can also record a series of user system configuration parameters, so as to make targeted adjustments to the product to better meet user needs.
other
Recruitment
In terms of recruitment, Pea Pod uses another product of 37signals, Highrise .
data
All data in Wandoujia is transparent, and the data including the current business volume, how much the company has earned so far, the corresponding speed of the website, etc. are all published in real time through Geekoboard , whether it is eating in the dining room. You can always see it in the elevator aisle.
Remotely
When I had to conduct remote meetings, I used Google+'s Hangout all the time . Later, because sometimes the network would be abnormal and QQ had the function of sharing the desktop, I often used QQ.
promote
Product designer Liu Yaping once gave a keynote speech at Geek Park , talking about how Wandoujia "falls in love" with users, and promotes and distributes applications with a case-by-case attitude.
order
You read that right, yes, ordering food can also improve efficiency if it goes well. In order to facilitate the management of aunts and everyone's ordering, Wandoujia has developed an automatic meal ordering system to feed peas ( open source on GitHub ). Go there.
If you are interested in this ordering system, you can watch this video on Youku . Feeding the peas is currently being refactored, and the 2.0 version that can combine menus will be released soon.
Epilogue
There is no best tool, only the best tool for you
As Wang Junyu said at the innovation conference before, productivity is like a sub-subject, you usually don't care about it, but you can't fail. Through the introduction of this article, you may also find that many workflows and tools need to be tried many times before you can find the most suitable one, so if your team is a small and scattered team, you can't copy it, you can refer to Fuubo's experience .
But no matter what, it is definitely worth doing with the help of tools to improve work efficiency, because in many cases, "only good products can be used to make better products."
Original address: http://www.geekpark.net/read/view/180279