Our project manager has shared recommendations on how to manage the development of complex web products so that the team and the customer would not be excruciatingly hurt. These tips seem obvious, but still, not everyone takes them into account when working on projects.
Understand customer
The customer does not always know our terminology and explains the wishes for the product in his usual language. It’s a normal part of the project manager’s job to find a way to communicate and understand the needs of the client.
We had a customer who wrote long letters with complex sentences and ornate phrases. From these letters, it was not clear what was meant. Solution: often call up, and after a telephone conversation to fix the agreement in letters. So, we were able to quickly come to an understanding of the problem, quickly coordinate work at each stage, and complete the project on time.
For some calls, we attract a team: a developer or designer, who immediately propose a solution or explain why we did so, and not differently.
Highlight the main things
In the process of working on complex services, the client may have ideas for developing the project. And there is a danger of delaying the time if you include these ideas in the contours of the current project.
Therefore, you need to agree with the client on the priority of tasks:
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First, implement all the key functions of the product, without which launch is impossible.
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Then – those that will be useful to users, but without them, you will get a working product.
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Functions that do not bring additional value to users are best taken outside the scope of the project.
Do not waste a lot of time on minor edits
The client can send small remarks in real-time: correct the phrase in the text, change the name of the button, replace the icon or photo, add or remove the pop-up window. If you rush right away to fix it, it turns out that all the time it takes for these comments, and work on the basic functionality of the project is stopped.
To prevent this from happening, we collect all the comments in one task on the kanban board and review them every 2-3 days, coordinate the relevance of the comments with the client, form tasks for the team.
