Stetoscope

In life, there are some things that seems in complete opposition: Day & Night, policemen & robbers, water & fire and…developers & designers.

Developers are supposed to be precise, functional and boring. Designers are expected to be cool, fun and superficial. A lot of  famous saga has been built on the opposition: the “PC/mac”, or the series “the IT crowd”.

However, everybody agrees on the idea that best achievement happens when those two characters works efficiently together (meaning the added value of each way of thinking are gathered). That is why, to build pearltrees, we created  a specific process!

Our goal was (and though still remain) to integrate the added value and constraints of developers, designers, product architect, marketing… even finance. Here is a short description of our conciliation process:

First, two groups are clearly distinguished

• The technical team: the technical architect, developers, production engineer
• The product team: the product architect, the designer, a representative of consumers point of view whose mission is to define some “briefs” to detail what should be achieve in each user stories.

1.    A common meeting to establish the key element of an iteration (4 hours) :

• The general objectives
• The user stories to achieve
• The allocation of human and time resources for each user stories
• An iteration planning
• The identification inputs points between developers and designer

2.    A daily morning meeting (10′) in front of the general planning where developers tell what they have the day before and what they will do the following day. It is a great opportunity to see the integration needs between the technical and product team

3.    A weekly product meeting to show the achievements of the week and discuss the iteration planning.

I  think this process worked quite well as to pearltrees but you can make your own opinion by testing www.pearltrees.com