From Idea to Implementation

From by One to by Many

Hidden magic happened in your brain when you are working on a project alone by starting from the idea to materialize it. It's so fast that sometimes you don't even know how it works in your mind.

When it comes to collaboration, those are no longer hidden. The works that the brain does scale up to the size of the team. The speed of the communication between neurons slows down from within a second to minutes or hours. And that is the perfect time for us to look into it about how it works.

By having the chance to collaborate with a squad of amazing people, I now have a rough but better idea about how it works.

And that's what I want to share with you.

First Try

We have a team with multiple disciplines, from product to design to development. We are a small team and we tried to work closely, that's why we try to create a universal workflow for all of us. And we tried to use it to capture the lifecycle of the feature from ideation to implementation.

But it didn't go smoothly after a couple of months of trial. The main issue we encountered is that things happened on parallel and some status of features going back and forth from that meant to flow toward one direction.

During the time, we still can deliver the works. But to the process, I can tell there was something that can be improved. I started thinking that maybe the workflow we're currently using was mostly for the development, even though we added the discovery phase in our cycle.

And I didn't realize that we might just need to extract the workflow from single one to each domain specifically.

One to Many

I only realize it when I'm looking for a lightweight tool to use to manage our project. Then I found an idea that I can actually have a workflow for each team that makes sense when I was trying to use Clubhouse (By the way, I'm also just a new user), there is a tutorial to introduce the idea of how to use the tool and it also covers the fact that you can set up the different workflow for each team.

It hits me, and suddenly, they are all connected. I quickly realized that in our team, we should at least have three workflows for the ideas, design, and development team to deliver the work.

Ideas workflow

The flow that can capture the ideas or any thoughts from various sources, and further decide which one should be moving forward to ideation and define the question with a certain level of concrete requirements for designers.

Design workflow

The flow that can take the requirements of the feature to start working on the design that will finally have a clear spec with assets to the development team.

Development workflow

Taking the readied spec to start building the functions, test, and finally deploy.

After drafting this down, I felt the question about the workflow and lifecycle of the project has been answered, at least partially.

It brings closure to me. I hope it also gives you whoever is reading this some good ideas.