The One With a Real Review

For the most part of this year, we haven’t really had a lot of contact with our main stakeholders, because we were focussed on providing APIs for other systems. We did some smaller things for our users but it rarely felt important enough to do a real review. When we did invite everyone to a review, 2 people participated and they didn’t say much.

Our focus has shifted at the beginning of the month and it will stay like this for a few months. Instead of focussing on enabling automation, we are going to work on making the non-automated parts of our business easier to work with. This means we are working directly with our stakeholders again, yay!

Today’s review had less participants than initially rsvp’d but still a lot more than we had in the other reviews this year. And they gave us some really good feedback for the new features we presented them, they answered some questions we had and they asked some questions themselves when we invited them to share things that don’t directly relate to what we had shown. And one of those problems was something we had wanted on for a while but never got enough feedback to start, so we asked whether a few of them could join a refinement meeting next week to hash out some more details.

This feels nice. This feels like product development. We still need to work on how we communicate new things and ask for feedback in between reviews, but we have some ideas for this as well.