"Turn" is the only fast-breaking: how to conduct product development and management efficiently by start-up companies

The World martial Arts is not hard to break, only fast not broken. In the fast-changing mobile internet field, start-up companies want to survive in the gap between the Giants, only by a good product is not enough, efficient and agile research and development capabilities is the key to the survival of the company. The efficient development model includes how to determine the development project, how to control the project progress, how to drive the product generation and how to mobilize the enthusiasm of the staff. Through interviews with pea pods, let's take a look at how the mobile internet company, known as China's most Silicon Valley fan, manages its product development process efficiently.

First, 5 key steps of efficient research and development

The first step: project--Set direction

During the whole development of pea pods, the project is called Product Brief or project Brief. The team's product manager writes a 1-2-page document and then reviews it with the executive team, and if the review passes, the project succeeds. The document typically contains the following content:

1. Vision: A sentence to express clearly what to do;

2. Analyze market opportunities and trends, and determine current strategy;

3. Identify the characteristics and core needs of the target user;

4. Existing solutions and their respective strengths and weaknesses;

5. The project's interest points on pea pods; If the project is not done, which competitors will do, the interests of the competitor;

6. What technologies are needed to support and drive, and which are the weaknesses of pea pods;

7. Manpower needs;

8. The urgency of the project, whether the need for rapid progress;

9. Release strategy;

10. Core metrics, used to measure success indicators.

The second step, OKR system--Set the target

Setting goals is important for a project because it determines how and to what extent. The target management adopted by pea pods is the OKR system (Objectives & key Results, goals and key outcomes) introduced from Google, which is slightly different from traditional KPIs (key performance Indicator, key performance evaluations):

1. OKR First is a communication tool: there are more than 300 pea pods, and everyone has to write OKR. All of these okr are placed in a document for ease of communication. Any employee can see what the CEO's most important goal for this quarter is and what the HR team is aiming for this quarter.

2. Okr is the direction and goal of the effort: OKR represents where you are going, not where you want to go.

3. Okr must be quantifiable. For example, setting exercise goals when exercising, if just defined as "we must strive to improve physical fitness", is certainly not a good OKR, because it is not measurable, the good OKR is "this year's running time than last year increased by one times."

4. The objectives must be consistent: The objectives of the creator and the performer are consistent, and the goals of the team and the individual are consistent. First, make the company's OKR; second, each team set their own OKR; Thirdly, each engineer or designer writes their own OKR. The three steps were completed independently, and then the okr of the three were coordinated against each other. In pea pods, OKR is not related to personal performance because the results of the OKR system are not directly linked to everyone.

5. Through the monthly meeting review, always follow up OKR: In the monthly meeting need to determine how to achieve the goal, is a help to achieve the goal of the process.

6. Through the quarterly meeting Review, adjust the OKR in time: The Internet changes very fast, so pea pods have a okr Review per quarter, the principle of adjustment is the goal (objectives) unchanged, only allow the adjustment of key results (key Results).

To better understand how the OKR system is developed, pea pods provide the following examples:

Goal (objectives): Release influential new features and make XXX products available to users on a daily basis.

Key results (keys Results):

0 days Active user volume is xx;

0 using XX method, improve the core indicators of XXX;

The third step, project management--Control progress:

After the goal is set, it is very important to implement, the general project management is actually control the progress.

1. Task/Progress synchronization. The calender of the entire company, including meetings, things to do, and time nodes for the project need to be synchronized in a timely manner. In the overall strategic layout, if a project has a very tight schedule, more communication must be made to ensure that every link is not a problem.

2. Standing meeting (Daily Sync): Daily standing meeting, general control in 10 minutes, everyone to explain their work today, need help, who can help, can more effectively adjust resources and research.

3. Multi-directional communication (Google docs/gmail/hangouts): For non-urgent matters, two teams or two people discuss all the designs together. The hangouts is used for quick response.

4. Weekly meeting (Weekly report): Weekly summary. Pea Pod Team product managers make weekly reports that report on the week's work, release, results, and data.

5. Data system: Muce is a data system for pea pods with all of the company's product data and operational data. Muce data can be used to verify the assumptions, orientations, etc. of the product.

The fourth step, personnel management-with team:

Project is carried out by a specific person, so it is very important to take the team, in personnel management, Pea Pod has three basic principles:

1, Re-organization & Change Group: The company encourages employees to change the group, everyone has the opportunity to do more interesting things to the favorite team. As long as the original team's performance is qualified, quarterly can apply for the team or change work content. Staff performance is not linked to OKR, the company encourages employees to challenge the difficulty, beyond the excellent, low level of things do not get good will be punished, do not pass will be punished.

2. One on a: on the side of the belt, it is very important to be on a. One on single refers to each team manager who needs to be on a regular basis (the best interval is once a week) to discuss or talk to each member of his or her team. In Pea pods, the manager is first a coach and should help the members of their team grow. With one on One,manager, you need to understand the state and experience of each team member at this stage, share career plans, help them deal with problems correctly, and better achieve personal growth.

3. Personal OKR and Performance system: Each employee needs to determine his/her quarterly OKR at the beginning of each quarter, and at the end of the quarter, the OKR will be graded according to the completion of his/her quarterly work. Every six months the company will conduct a performance Review, mainly Review employees in the past six months performance, and according to the results of performance Review change Job Ladder (business rank) and compensation. It is worth mentioning that in pea pods, all individual performance Review achievements and levels are shared publicly throughout the company, as shown in. This is unthinkable for a lot of companies, why would pea pods do this? Because on the one hand the pea pod can be more fair and transparent, on the other hand also gives each pea a better learning and growth of their own samples, inspire people in product development more high-quality challenges and requirements for themselves.

The fifth step, interest management--exhaust interference:

1. Arousing interest: Hack Day, a special festival of Pea pods, began in 2010, similar to the hackathon. Usually during the week of the Spring Festival holiday, product designers and engineers formed a team of 3-5 people to fully demonstrate the creativity and imagination of the engineering team for 48 hours in a row, accomplishing something more geek and more interesting than the daily development.

Pea pod in order to encourage people to better complete the challenge, will also design some special features of the prizes, history of 2012 years to provide Apple has just out of Macbook retina,2013 year is Google glass,2014 year is the programmer's favorite Herman Miller top chair.

In the history of the Hackday, a lot of works eventually became important products released, such as Muce, pea wash white and IAS (in-app search), has become a very distinctive pea pod products.

2, control interest: Polish Week, let the company slow down, the details of the product has been refined process. In the process of mass development and the launch of new products, we worry that we are not paying enough attention to the details of our products because we go too fast. After 3 working weeks in a row, the 4th week is usually Polish Week. During the week of Polish Week, the pea pods do not develop new products or functions, but are mainly to polish existing products and services, solve some details and minor bugs, such as the unification of some fonts in the product, etc. On average, each Polish Week solves a variety of bugs in the product by about 200.

Ii. processes and tools for efficient research and development

In the past few years, when the Pea pod was made in Windows, it tried one months, two months, one weeks, two weeks of release rhythm, the whole model is more like Chrome, has the function release wants to send early. We have updates on the server every day, the client will be a bit slower, now it's probably a two-week version, as shown in:

At the development tempo, the first two weeks are used for development, then the Intercept branch is ready for release, the next two weeks are tested, and another development is carried out, each iteration being controlled within two weeks. Relatively speaking, the service side of the release is relatively good operation, can do a lot of regression testing and automated testing, do not need to do manual testing to publish, but Windows and Android will have some Beta release, in the internal difficult to emulate the user's usage scenarios and user environment, so in the release After the process is generally sampled 1%, 5%, 10% such a rhythm to do the verification, mainly to see whether certain indicators are standard.

This process is just beginning to execute with a lot of problems. For example, after the development of this week, the test found that there is no test, there are a lot of bugs, engineers have to use the second development cycle to fix bugs, and then affect the second cycle of development, the problem is more and more, it will make the process difficult, and then into a vicious circle. To solve this problem, first start with a one-month iteration at the operational level and ask the Master branch to be available (for example, if someone commits a code that doesn't run or is not tested and hinders other colleagues, it will be asked to have the whole team drink coffee). The second step is to strengthen the unit test and regression test to ensure that the quality of each iteration is controllable, and the following tests are mainly regression and calibration to relieve overlapping pressure problems. After one months of iteration run smoothly, then run to two weeks, a week of rhythm, overall, almost six months of time, the Pea pod completely ran this process, want to quickly, want to slow can slow.

"Turn" is the only fast-breaking: how to conduct product development and management efficiently by start-up companies