As some of you¹ might have realized, I am not writing any articles recently. I could state a lot of different reasons why (and some of them will be material for upcoming blog posts, by the way), but the main concrete reason for it is that I am spending most of my spare time creating my blog.

Whether the world needs another dev-tech-geeky blog made with Gatsby is highly arguable, but what is interesting for me is the process.

As opposed to my stereotypical pet project, I am trying to stick with a "business-like" process.

Design

Following what I learned from this awesome book, I have split the design of this product into layers, allowing me to get to the design phase with a lot of light already shed.

The document I produced can be found here.

As you can see, the document is far from the level of details discussed in the book and way more simplistic. Nonetheless, it turned out to be a huge productivity boost for me. With development (and music and other things within my comfort zone) it was crystal clear which kind of difference a proper plan could make. With design, for me, it was mindblowing.

The main focus during this phase has been forgetting I am a developer, forget technical constraints and try as hard as I could to think like a designer.

This led me to produce the design you can see here.

Owning the product

If shifting from the Developer to Designer has been hard, shifting from Developer to Product Owner is actually being even harder.

Although I thought I knew what to expect from a good user story, producing a good one is actually a completely different story (pun intended).

This is the board I am working with.

Why this post?

Well, as my own Product Owner I feel a bit at loss right now.

Maybe I am introducing too much boureaucracy in the process, but I really struggle in dividing my Developer self from my Product Owner self and this is exactly why I am asking for your help.

As developers, what would you like to see in a board like this? What is missing?

As product owners, can you suggest any good resource to learn how to write kickass stories and tickets?

Thank you all!

If you were still wondering, the code is still in a very bad shape, but as soon as I reach the v0.0.1 milestone, I will open source it.

1. It's actually a lot of you ❤ I never would have thought of having ~3.5k followers. Thanks to each and every one of you!