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How do you keep your team up to date with tech changes?
Recorded – watch the full episode on YouTube.
You've got 15 coming out in a few months coming out, you've got Swift updates, you've got new devices two or three times a year – how do you help your team keep up with all these changes?
Jordanna Kwok: We certainly try to make sure that we're organizing all of these things. There’s a product roadmap that has all the product features on it, and so people can look at this roadmap, look at its priorities and say, "Oh, this is what's important to the product." And then they can pitch ideas and put it on that roadmap, so it's not like things are coming left and right – there's something that people can look at.
And there's also a technical roadmap, with all the stuff you talked about including new features for Swift, or how might we integrate with Combine and use more of that in our code base. So as these new features come in, we try to fit them on the road map to see what the priority is. If it's going to unlock new product features or it's going to unlock efficiencies in terms of building UIs, then, yeah, we want to prioritize that for sure.
"We also have hack days, which are not on the roadmap. Those are just complete hack days that you can do whatever you want and some of them have turned into real features."
If it's something that is going to make us build video playback in line a lot quicker than we want to, we’d probably put that project upfront and so people can work on that first. But we also have hack days, which are not on the roadmap. Those are just complete hack days that you can do whatever you want and some of them have turned into real features – the hack will be really popular, people respond to it well, and there might be a product manager somewhere who is like, “I actually want to A/B test that now,” and pull it in.
So those hack days have been great for just building demos and things like that where you get to show off something that maybe doesn't seem like a thing that we would productize or roll out at first, but when people play with it, that's the biggest thing. Where they see it in action – that's when they get interested.
This transcript was recorded as part of Swiftly Speaking. You can watch the full original episode on YouTube, or subscribe to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
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