Turning Ideas into Work

Overview

Teams want to turn great ideas into shipped product. The reason people rely on Pivotal’s services is because we teach them how to do that. Tracker is an important part of that journey, so one of our goals with New Tracker was to ensure that the thread running from an idea to code in production (and tracking success metrics) was solidly build into the product.

We started by mapping out this thread, in what we eventually called the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC).

With a solid hypothesis of the lifecycle, we focused on the “beginning” of the lifecycle: a business objective.

Opportunity #1

Opportunity: Help teams understand how their work contributes towards business objects. Why? So everyone is always working towards the same North Star.

“Yes, but what value does that [pice of work] bring? What change are we actually trying to achieve in the real world?”

— Director

We’ve witnessed this sentiment with many teams in large organizations Either an organizational vision doesn’t exist, or communication from the top is broken. We also see this with our customers who return home from a Labs engagement. Teams are focused on solving one specific problem for one specific user while they’re in the Lab, but when they return home they have to rejoin the ecosystem of the organization they’re a part of. Inevitably, all of these teams, whether on a Labs engagement or not, begin to miss the forest for the trees, and forget the overall vision.

Solution: Bring the organizational vision into the tool. Integrate with Pivotal Outcomes to expose the status of individual outcomes the team is working towards. Tie each outcome to specific epics so teams can ensure that each story they are working on ties directly to the org vision.

Early wireframes of connecting outcomes to epics

We conducted concept testing to understanding which parts of the design people gravitated towards (and away from).

From this we learned:

PMs find outcomes and epics pages particularly useful, but want more integrations with roadmapping tools.
PMs and Portfolio Managers want to visualize different “levels” of information.
Users do not want prominent “release date.” Dates have always been part of Classic Tracker, but in this iteration we made them more prominent, which incited concern in our users (ex: “The notion of time would make weird stakeholder things happen in the backlog.”). We realized that we need to include them in a way that is more forecasting-focused, rather than deadline-focused.

Subsequent iteration of connecting outcomes to epics

Opportunity #2

Opportunity: Help teams break down, and deliver, work in a simple way. Why? So teams can spend time on the actual work, rather than fighting with a complicated product management tool.

Tracker’s core users prefer Tracker over other tools, because it’s easy to get started and it has a straightforward workflow.

“I wish Jira was @pivotaltracker every day :). Jira can do everything, but nothing well. Pivotal is excellent for Scrum/Kanban teams.”

— User via Twitter

Solution 1: Help teams move ideas from the planning stage to the completed stage on a simple canvas

Solution 2: Teach team how to be consistent in their practices so they can reliably forecast when work will be done

Solution 3: Promote communication over documentation, by helping them create “story cards” that are appropriately sized with the right amount of information to stay lean

We started by running a “card experience” workshop to understand the most critical, least critical, and missing aspects of a story card (as compared to Current Tracker).

We released an initial version and iterated on the designs several times, based upon feedback from interviews and through the app. This feedback helped us understand the relative importance of different components and the best places to insert “pro tips” on best practices.

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