Welcome to "Winding Down With Product Managers."
One of the things that we get asked quite a bit is about our process. Especially in earlier
conversations in the sales process Crema is known pretty well for our process and getting things
done.
And so I think it's important for us to talk a little bit about that now and why we use the
processes that we use.
So maybe elaborate a little bit there on what we use here at Crema and why.
There will be certain projects that we need to use Kanban on like I've mentioned previously.
Sometimes that includes design sprints or design and prototyping engagements.
When you first engage with a client or begin building out a product, you're not doing much
development work. You're doing a lot of strategy, a lot of design, a lot of maybe user testing and
feedback.
So at that stage of the engagement or relationship with the product its fairly common for us to use
Kanban.
And that's OK.
And it runs really smoothly. It's worked well, but once that kind of moves into development we defer
to Scrum including some of the, you know, kind of molded and pulled in pieces from Kanban as needed
and as applicable.
There are a lot of reasons why we've chosen to go that route.
But from you know the PMs here, we really care about our team, about our product.
And a part of that team, like Tuck mentioned, is the client and sometimes they need protecting too
and sometimes, being protected from themselves.
Right.
So scrum really allows us to do that by default.
We use scrum and a lot of it at large in fact is around the fact that we want to protect our team,
protect our client, protect our product, and honestly also protect ourselves.
Right.
As product managers, we need time to think about things. We need time to do our own jobs. And if
we're constantly triaging every little request that's coming in and trying to get it over the
team immediately and all that, it doesn't really give us much space to do our jobs.
And so I would also argue that Scrum really helps us prioritize our own work and helps us be able to
write all the stories that we need to write along with the team of course and then do effective
planning for the project which can go to the wayside if we're just constantly taking in
requests and not really having that time to do it.
I love it.
I also love incorporating Scrum and Kanban together. Whatever gets you the best outcome.
And that happens pretty frequently, especially if we have projects where, you know, design continues
to happen. Obviously there are projects where we work in an ideal world.
Right.
So those design tasks for example. We don't always work, at least with my projects,
we don't story point the design tasks whereas anything development related of course we do. But
that's kind of outside of what was normal process for Scrum. Some businesses (and rightly so) create
the story and then all your design involvement and everything is all wrapped up in that.
We do have to take some special considerations on our products since we are in an agency and the
processes may look a little bit differently because of that.
And so that's why sometimes we have design tasks separated out which is not traditional for the
Scrum method, but that's another example of something that's a little bit combined that works
to the better of the team.
I love that! You know, I love the flexibility to do what you need to do to get the job done.
Yeah it's pretty great.
So one question we get a lot is, "What tools are we going to use for the projects?" You'll have to
subscribe to us obviously to get big deep dives into all of these, but we can give you a quick
general overview of what tools we do use for these processes and why.
The first big one is Asana. So that has traditionally been our go-to tool for all of our
projects and most recently we've started to move away from it for anything that is more Scrum
related.
Kanban works great. It's a great task manager. It's great for collaboration and visibility
amongst all the teams. But really, at the end of the day, it doesn't do everything we need to do
for Scrum and so we've kind of shied away from it because of that.
We still think it's a great tool. It's designed very well, it's very quick, and honestly most of
our team still really loves it. It just doesn't do all the things we need it to do in order to
support the Scrum process.
But overall if you're going to be set up in more of a Kanban environment it's a great tool to go
ahead and use.
And then we also use on some of our engagements,
we used Jira and I'm a little bit biased. I love Jira. It's my favorite tool for development
projects.
It is so flexible, it's so robust. But because of that, that impedes a lot of people from using it.
They're working on it.
I know they're working on it, and the UI and the overall UX is starting to change because of that.
But it has a lot to take in because because of how inherently flexible it is, there are so many
different triggers you can pull, so many customizations you can do, and so when you're
first getting into it especially as an entire organization,
It can be very daunting to move everything over to it to get all your processes set up in it, to get
your users set up in it.
But it is the go to. I mean, a lot of a lot of products use it for their product development and
that's why it's used throughout the globe is because of how well it works.
Yeah it really can't handle any project you throw at it whether it's Kanban, Scrum. Any other type
in between, business projects, anything you can draw out you can do.
Absolutely.
It's like the Cadillac of the tools.
Yeah, we love Jira.
Clearly!
But there is one more tool that I am learning to love so much.
It is my go to right now.
And as a PM I feel like other PMs could probably back this up like I am all about finding the next
tool.
I will pay for however many apps I need to pay for as long as I'm learning and playing with things
and one of our other PMs on this team found Ora and it's amazing!
The UI is phenomenal. It's gorgeous.
The team that built it is very small and they care a lot about what their users are feeling and
thinking and how they're going to use it.
So they built this tool out to be initially Kanban style but they have removed any stringencies
around it.
It gives you the ultimate flexibility to do with it whatever you want.
It makes developers happy, it makes designers happy, it makes me happy.
But with all that said, you know, it's got some growing to do since it's so new.
But i would recommend checking that out as well.
I'm excited to see what's to come from them in the future.
They've already changed so much since we started.
It'll be exciting to see where they go in the coming years.
Yeah I'm thoroughly impressed with it and I look forward to learning more about, you know, what
their road map paths and how they want to make it better.
So check that out let us know what you think.
Tell us what you think about how we implement things here at Crema.
Leave us comments. Like this. Follow us.
Tell us what you want us to dive into deeper because this is really just brushing the surface
of all of these topics and we could talk about all this stuff for days. Maybe years.
Yeah it's our bread and butter.
So let us know what you want, let us know what you think, and thanks for watching!