By Tayler Gilmartin
onPeak’s Product team is responsible for understanding customer and business needs and bringing ideas to life to improve the user’s experience. Not only do we choose what to build, we also communicate the benefits and measure the product’s performance. The ultimate goal is to deliver value to our users and support the business. Alongside the internal teams, we work together to design, build, test, and launch product features. These features could be new features, existing feature enhancements, or even bug fixes.
Product Development Cycle
The Product Development Cycle refers to the process of coming up with an idea, researching that idea, designing the idea to meet the user’s needs, and bringing that idea to life. There are many different definitions and outlines of the Product Development Cycle stages. I breakdown the stages as follows: ideation, research, design, define, develop, test, launch, and iterate.
Through this endless cycle, we iterate over and over, improving our already existing products and bringing new ones to life.
Who is Involved?
Currently, our team is made up of Product Managers who moonlight as designers, but in the future, we plan to bring on a Product Designer specific to UI and UX. We’ll talk a little bit about each role below including our developer and QA friends. While developers and QA are not a group within the Product team, they play an important role in the product development cycle.
Product Managers
Product Managers work to define strategies that will help build successful features by listening to customer and business needs, understanding the technology, and aligning these needs with the business goals. We are responsible for the product vision, product roadmap, and product success. We work to translate those user needs into requirements and specifications: what needs to happen, when should it happen, and how should it happen. We work with a designer to define design specific guidelines: how should it look and how should it feel. From there, we hand over the requirements to a developer, who implements these updates and truly brings the ideas to life. If you want a good laugh, watch the video linked here for a glimpse into writing good specs. View Video Here
Product Designer / UI & UX Designers
Product Designer / UI & UX Designers cater to the user’s point of view. Their focus is on UX (user experience) best practices, UI (user interface) design best practices, and ultimately creating a coherent user experience. Some of their responsibilities include conducting user interviews, usability testing, and design prototyping.
Developers
Developers take the requirements and specifications defined by the Product Manager and Designer and implement that through writing code. Not only are they writing the code, but they are also writing tests to ensure a feature works as intended and doesn’t break existing functionality.
Quality Assurance (QA)
Our Quality Assurance (QA) team members are the ones who try to break what the developers built. Yes … on purpose. They test the features and ensure the feature is not just working as intended, but the feature meets the quality standards. They will work to test every possible scenario to identify errors and provide feedback to ensure the users have a smooth, error-free experience.
A Day in the Life …
Product Manager: “The light above the u-shaped, corner desk on the 2nd floor office is not working. We should replace the lightbulb, so that anyone working at this desk can do so without visibility issues. The standard bulb used is …”
Product Designer: “Okay, so what color lightbulb will create the best working experience? I mean … what vibe are we going for? Let me check with everyone who uses a lightbulb in their office.”
Interviews every person in the office … “
Okay, so 82.03% said LED Daylight, so the exact bulb we will use is …”
Developer: Sighs, picks up the lightbulb and screws it in …“This work for everyone?”
QA: Flips light switch on and off multiple times, unscrews lightbulb and flips light switch on and off multiple times again, screws lightbulb back in and flips light switch on and off again while jumping up and down, spinning around, and talking really loud …“It works guys!”
Product Manager: “Awesome! Next time we change the lightbulb, we should think about costs, energy efficie…”
Product Designer, Developer, and QA exit the room …
