< 1 minute

Maintaining Laundry Lists

As you might know, we are a strong believer of  Getting Real approach in developing web-based products. But how do we implement it at Digicorp?

I would like to share one small incident which happened yesterday.

I am working as a Product Manager of an enterprise product for more than 5 years. Few months back it got deployed in various states of India and at national level as well. The product is on a very delayed state due to various reasons but that is the story for another post.

Yesterday our QA came to me and talked about few suggestions he had for the product. One of the very basic suggestions was “the user, if buyer is not able to change password.” Well, it is shocking that the product did not have even this basic feature at this stage. May be there was never a need for it till now.

Now his question was, “Where do I maintain this list? Should I put it on our bug tracker?”

Following the Getting Real approach, I asked him not to put it on any list, let there be a real need from customers. This way, we can avoid maintaining big lists.

Before reading the book, I used to maintain lot of laundry lists and had those painful sessions of going through each issues. Now my mind is free to think about making the product better.

After this decision, once again I got assured that maintaining big laundry lists is too time consuming and it forces us to loose focus from the real goal.

Do you believe in this approach? Do share your thoughts.