Speeding product development – making teamwork work
· Materiaalit · This Is Not a Webinar 2021 syksy · Virtuaalitapahtuma
People accomplish everything in life with the help of others – and this goes for product development as well. Behind every great product is a great product team!
So how do you make sure the QA team, Developers and Designers all play together and strive for the same goal? What are the key success factors? What challenges are there working in a rapidly growing product team? What role does culture play in all this?
It’s a tough challenge – but at Brella, we have our own way of ensuring that our Quality Assurance, Development and Design teams are aligned and moving towards the same goal at lightspeed! We’ll tell you all about it, so keep reading.
How Brella makes teamwork work
We, Lily, Sara and Krista from Brella discussed in the Mimmit koodaa event what it’s like to collaborate in a development team with different roles and backgrounds.
Every new feature starts with a designer, in this case, Lily. Her responsibilities include researching problems, collecting feedback from stakeholders, and creating both functional and visually appealing designs. We place a high emphasis on amazing, intuitive design, so Lily’s work is incredibly important to creating an amazing end product.
After the design is approved, it goes to Sara, who is a Front-end developer (FE). She will bring the design to life together with Back-end developers (BE) into a beautiful and functional web page/ product. Without our developers, Lily’s amazing designs would never come to life.
Finally, once our developers feel that the implementation matches the requirements, Krista, as a quality specialist (QA), will do her best to break it before it goes to real users. This may sound funny, but it’s actually a crucial part of the development process! As a QA, Krista needs to think of all the possibilities of how a user might try to use the platform and create automated tests to ensure that the feature doesn’t break unexpectedly in the future.
#squadgoals
At Brella, the product team works in squads that include at least one Designer, FE, BE and QA. This means that each squad can independently design, implement and deploy new features in their own area of expertise. This requires close communication within the team and regular updates to the rest of the product department.
We also give product demos to commercial and customer success teams to keep them updated with our progress. It’s incredibly important to keep open communication channels with the rest of the company, as they have first-hand knowledge of how our customers use and receive our product.
Working in a product company and on the same product for a long time is fascinating due to the large scale of our impact and the amount of ownership. In the longer-term, we are able to work on features from end to end, and fine-tune every detail along the way. This means we have a bigger impact on the product; and consequently, more ownership of our work.
Thank you Mimmit Koodaa!
This was the first time for all three of us to give a speech to a larger audience and before the event we were a bit anxious, but as soon as we started the panel talk with Milja, her relaxed and welcoming personality helped us forget any fears and we just enjoyed the ride. We would definitely do it again!
And we will leave you with one final quote from our speech:
“IT is amazing!”
Don’t believe us? Watch the webinar and learn how amazing IT can be 😉
Lily Dang, Visual Designer
Krista Juselius, QA Specialist
Sara Klimko, Frontend Developer
