Fail Fast. Succeed Faster.
Fail Fast. Succeed Faster.
Rich Gilbank - @richgilbank
- Number of devs vs number of bd/stakeholders vs introverts
- I'll cover prototyping from both perspectives
Today!
- Introductions
- Context
- FAIL (really!)
- Benefits of prototyping for developers
- Benefits of prototyping for business stakeholders
- Takeaways
- Q&A
- Introductions - A little about myself and my background
- Context - Why this is important, the problems that led us here
- Fail - How failing can help you as a developer, and why to dedicate time - Prototyping
- Benfits:developers - What devs can gain from prototyping
- Benefits:stakeholders - What BD can gain
- Takeaways - Things to take back to your company
Introduction
Who are you? Who am I? How did I get here?
- Front end dev at Shopify
- In case there's any confusion about Jet Cooper - to clear up
- Apparently we were doing something right - I think process and culture were part of it
Shopify
- SaaS
- > 70,000 Merchants
- $1,000,000,000 GMV (Gross Merchandise Value)
- Commerce platform for online and in-person sales
- Over 70,000 Merchants have sold $1B worth of products
- Gross Merchandise Value is cumulative total of products sold through Shopify
- [fragment]
- UX Design and Development Agency
- Conceptualization - Product Strategy - Architecture - Art Direction - Interface design - FED
- No BED
- Going to share some techniques and tips we learned
Jet Cooper Clients
- We've had the pleasure of working with a number of great clients
- Some of which have been successful brands in Canada, which you may recognize
- Through through all of them though, we've built our process
- Fledgling company - worked with these clients through the value we drove
- Going to provide an example from another company
Some Context
This isn't where I parked my car…
- That's who we are, here's where we're coming from
Developer Culture
Today's situation
- Designers give us mockups
- Step 1 - Designers give us mockups
- Step 2 - WTF
- Full of components and pieces we can't feasibly implement
Waterfall Pain points
- Unsustainable
- Work reflects developer sentiment
- No dev feedback in planning
Waterfall model:
- Designers hand-off to devs to cook it up.
Unstaggering our model at Jet Cooper
Our "Unstaggered" model:
Waterfall
Unstaggered
- Went from the annoying tetris pieces to a nice flat-stacked model
- What did we do with that extra ~20% time?
Benefits of designer follow-up time
- QA
- Pattern research
Benefits of developer lead time
- Conceptualization
- Research
- Collaboration with team
- [fragments]
- Conceptualization
- Research
- Collaboration with team - BD/Browsers
- And Prototyping - [slide]
Benefits of developer lead time (continued)
- Prototyping
- Prototyping is...
- Similar to creative recess
Recess!
(Of the creative variety)
Back on topic:
Prototyping
- Mini labs programs
- Experimental ideas - devs test hypotheses and iterate after
Prototyping led to two main outcomes:
- Trying more things
- Failing more often
- Trying more things
- Everyone and their dog has a library or set of opinionated tools or workflows
- Testing these tools was one outcome of lead time
- Failing more often
- Things didn't work, often just for our purposes
And now, for a brief interlude.
Prototyping IRL
Client discovery / Product Strategy
- Client X came to us looking to design and implement a responsive UI
- Why? Poor interaction and engagement
- New idea - push notifications
Planning and prototyping
Full circle
- Feedback re: devices and support
- During design, we investigated MVC frameworks
- Explain MVC investigation outcomes
- Backbone + many plugins
- Angular.js
- Backbone + Marionette
Drawing on the toolbox
- Even though our client work is wrapping up, many of the gained insights will be continue to prove themselves valuable in Shopify (Product-side)
- A short while later, I was working on a small personal project and used Angular
- Segue - So, that's an example of one of the outcomes of prototyping time - failing set us up for success
Fail!
No, really!
- We learned it's best to fail as early as possible, because that failure leads to better answers. Prototyping is ideal for this.
- [Segue] - Now, here are some guidelines for prototyping to help you fail effectively:
Failing for prototyping
- Get your hands dirty
- Timebox prototyping to problem scope
- Don't use your prototypes in production
- Guidlines for prototyping - How to fail well and fail early
- Get your hands dirty - Take time not just to research, but to actually build
- Hands on experience vs theoretical. Where does a tech thrive/falter?
- Additionally, Weaknesses in one context = strengths in another
- Bird in the hand
- Timeboxing - Protoyping time must be finite, proportional to problem size
- [agile] - What is necessary and sufficient?
- In this case, minimum time is what's necessary to experiment on the required materials
- Max is to not infringe on production time or spend time refactoring
- Prototypes in production - Code inevitably sloppy.
- Difference in objectives - testing vs scaling
- Restart from scratch with learnings
- [fragment] - quote
- Now, let me introduce the three archetypal developer personas as I see it
"Master" vs "Expert" vs "Learner"
"Master" mentality
- Neckbeard; set in their ways
"Expert" mentality
- New and shiny
- Jack of all trades, master of none
"Learner" mentality
- Superhero; not afraid to fail
- Consequently, fails often
- Doesn't immediately jump on a bandwagon; waits for its maturity
- This is who we want to be because: stays on top of latest trends, stable code, etc
- Segue - What causes master/expert syndrome
Causes of "Master" and "Expert" mentalities
- Self-perception
- Perceived social perception
[fragments]
- Self-perception - "Know-it-all" mindframe, overconfidence - in familiar tech for master, emerging tech for expert
- Perceived social perception - concern/fear that clients and peers will look down for not knowing the best solution
- Explain tweet - illustrates the belief that the social perception demands extensive experience to be effective with something
- Segue - So, how do we break out of this pattern or prevent ourselves from falling into it?
How to break out of "Master"/"Expert" thinking
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and become a Learner
- Acceptance - "I don't know, but let's find out."
- Passion - Stay passionate in your off-time
- Hack - "Make it yours."
- Interpret - Come to your own conclusions
- Acceptance - I don't know but let's find out
- Passion - Passion speaks volumes
- Hacker - Adopt a hacker mind frame (notion of experimentation) - make it yours
- Interpret - Listen to opinions and trends but don't follow blindly
The Benefits of Prototyping: Developers
- Quickly test and validate assumptions
- Build on insights to deliver best possible end solution
- Avoid running into the same errors further down
- Improved codebase stability
- Building your toolbox
- Quickly test and validate assumptions - Is X all it's cracked up to be?
- Build on insights to deliver the best end solution - Leverage a wider breadth of knowledge to make informed decisions
- Avoid running into the same errors further down - Fail early; fail during prototyping; you'll still fail during the project
- Improved codebase stability - Add stability by preventing monkey-patching - no need to compensate for inadequacies of chosen development route
- Build your toolbox - Grow your knowledgebase; gained insights = lifelong.
- To reiterate, things that didn't work for this project may work for another
The Benefits of Protoyping: Business Stakeholders
- Improved value generation
- Leverage the latest technologies (without going overboard)
- Improved development culture and passion
- 1) Prototyping drives more value by producing stable, high quality outcomes
- Consequently, quality of output per dollar is up
- Verified by Jet Cooper
- 2) Leverage, without conforming to, the latest technologies by utilizing development team's cumulative pragmatic asessments
- 3) Culture & Passion - We developers like what we do.
- Encourage them by facilitating their inquisitive nature
- Enable them to do their best work by giving this time to play with new & shiny
- Segue - So here are some takeaways for developers and business stakeholders alike.
Takeaways
- Admit to not knowing.
- Play the field early
- Build your toolbox
- Fail fast, fail often
- Admit to not knowing - Be a learner rather than an expert or master
- Learners adapt, masters become outdated
- Play the field early - Give yourself time before committing to a particular route
- Build your toolbox - Share your insights, learnings, build on existing knowledge
- Finally, Fail fast, fail often - Failing will be continuous; mitigate its damage by allocating time to it and doing it as soon as possible