Articles on Process
Lessons from Developing a Community Learning Platform – Bendable.com
An interview with Rick Wartzman and Sarah Zaner. In the midst of a global pandemic, Carbon Five client, Drucker Institute, launched Bendable, a community-based learning platform, in June 2020. We sat down with Rick Wartzman, Executive Director, and Sarah Zaner, Senior Director at KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at Drucker Institute, to learn …
Greenfield Projects: Seven Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success
Greenfield projects have a hidden set of needs — and each one can be an opportunity for growth if handled well! But if handled poorly or if not handled at all, these pitfalls can perpetuate and multiply across the lifetime of the project, taking you further and further away from your treasure and further into the endless cave of despair.
Shifting to A Work From Home Policy: A Mini Survival Guide for Your Company
Given the COVID-19 crisis, most companies that can have shifted to temporary work from home policy. While about a quarter of those companies are likely already adept at working remotely — at least to some degree. The rest are completely new to this way of working and it’s not an easy shift. I’d like to …
Recap: Running Remote Product Teams Fireside Chat
Carbon Five has worked with a variety of clients across the globe and within our own five offices that require remote collaboration while maintaining a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion. With a lot of teams transitioning to remote workforces, we opened up the conversation to share some of our best practices. We would love …
What Are These $%^&* Chores Doing in My Backlog!
Beyond Just Features and Bugs Projects tend to have three types of “tasks” for developers to do: features, bugs, and chores. Features and bugs are mostly self-explanatory. Features deliver direct customer value. Bugs are features that are not working as intended. These two tasks focus on direct connections to the users. Chores provide indirect customer …
Working with Guests: Seven Tips for Getting your Company Ready to Leverage External Firepower
Companies have been successfully partnering with consultants since the dawn of time. Think IDEO’s work with Apple to create the mouse or Microsoft’s work with IBM to create MS-DOS. Our nation’s competitive strength comes, in large part, from this openness to collaborate, to learn from each other, to move quicker, and to leverage outside strengths, …
Changes Requested
Each team has their own tolerance for what is and is not a reason to request changes on a PR and block it from being merged. This may be rooted in process, fairness, and expediency, and may be a company or team decision. Whatever your personal philosophy may be, the team as a whole and …
How to Make Your Daily Stand-up Outstanding
Where else can you learn what your coworkers are doing, get your work unblocked, and get energized, all in 10 action-packed minutes?
Map vs Path
It’s a simple idea that can help your digital product take shape; when a user enters your system, do you hand them a map or a path? What’s the difference? Great question, and in this case, the metaphor is pretty literal.
Experiment-Driven Design Process
So you want to grow your product? That’s super awesome. Growth is often a goal that startups rush towards. “We need 100,000 monthly active users yesterday.” – random startup person Growth can mean a lot of things. Maybe you’re trying to grow the number of users, or increase time spent using your product. Whatever it …