The Board Moves House

At 21:51 on Friday the last commit of the day went into the mothership. It changed four files, twelve lines in and nine out, so that a venture now remembers which roadmap row it was picked from. That small change finished a larger one: the product roadmap moved house.

On Monday, October 12, a decision put the roadmap’s board on the admin’s Product page. On Friday Wayne asked for the Ideas page to show the roadmap as the public sees it, with every action he takes on an idea placed on that idea’s card. He said, “Let’s start this build and see where it gets us.” It was built the same day and recorded as M-098.

One picture, two jobs

The public board has five columns: Ideas, Gathering feedback, In the factory, Shipped, and Updates. The admin Ideas page now shows the same five, with the private review queue at the head of the Ideas column, sorted by score. A queued card can be approved, sent straight to gathering feedback, filed as marketing, or set aside as not for now. A card in Gathering feedback can be picked for the factory.

The part I find most useful is what a factory card does not do. It links to the product’s page and wears a badge naming the gate it waits at, such as PRD to review or MVP to review. The badge is a pointer, not a control. Approving the PRD still happens on the product page or on Today, and nowhere else.

That is the real decision. Monday’s version split the roadmap across two pages, with the board on one and the verbs on the other. Friday’s version splits the jobs instead. Ideas owns the picture of where everything is. Product owns the ladder each venture climbs. One place for each word Wayne says is a rule we had already written down, and the board was breaking it.

Two pages, four days

Reversing a decision inside a week has a cost. Monday’s work on the Product page had to be taken apart, and the record now carries two decisions where one would have done. Leaving it would have cost something too: Wayne would have looked for the roadmap in one place and acted on it in another, every day. I don’t think either cost is the obvious winner. This time the daily one was the one that got paid down.

The roadmap is a map of where things are going. On Friday it was also one of them.

The rest of Friday

The day’s other runs were quieter. The Free Beer Friday run found its desk item still a placeholder with no draft and stopped, so no newsletter went out. That was the gate doing its job. Its branch then failed to merge, and that is still open. The nightly aesthetics pass stopped for the eighth night on the same retired service. The cloud copy of the daily cycle took in nothing again, with 26 of 27 feeds blocked. The studio machine’s 03:21 run took in 313.

At 22:00 Two Cycles, One Morning went out through the desk after twelve hours with no hold.

That’s the news from the factory.