This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
Accept our Terms of Service
Our Terms of Service have recently changed! Please read and agree to the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy
Permalink

In an office building, in the middle of somewhere, a company sits.

It is building a product. An ambitious product. Software to end all software - a tool to integrate all the systems.

The team is (the expected amount) competent, the runway is short but exists, and the CEO has sold a dozen impossible features, two dozen possible but extremely difficult ones, some plausible ones, and one that the prototype can succesfully perform.

So business as usual for a fledgling product company.

And the company is having their - business as usual - weekly sprint planning.

Total: 10
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

"Everyone's here, except Apricot?", Orange frowns. "He should be in office today. Anyone seen him?"

Permalink

"Not today, he missed lunch. But it's still five minutes until the scheduled meeting. He's never actually late."

Permalink

And about fifteen seconds later, Apricot stumbles out of a storage room of cleaning supplies. There are more and less subtle signs that he has just woken up.

"Good morning everyone!" he proclaims. "Orange, how did the call with the" - yaaaaawn - blinking - "eeehm, bank API provider go?"

Permalink

"Afternoon. Quite well, I'd say. We'll still need to negotiate an actual contract, but we're getting access to the sandbox environment today, so you can start integrating it immediately."

He flips open his laptop, navigating to the kanban board tracking high-level tasks. The section marked "backlog" has been expanding in a worrying pace. He nervously reorders some of the items on the bottom, before turning eyes to the "in progress" section. "Ok, lets go through the updates. Vanilla, you first?"

Permalink

Vanilla also has her laptop open.

"Morning! And yeah that works. Just a second." 

Keyboard noises. Vanilla quickly browses through the assigned tickets and checks what was marked completed last week.

"The new interface prototype is progressing. Completed navigable prototypes for three different approaches but we're not quite sure which approach to commit iterating on and for building the more complex features with."

"The next steps for the interface development are otherwise clear for this week but I'm unsure how last weeks plans compare to the new backlog items, might need to address that, and additionally choose one of the three approaches today."

Permalink

"We should probably have a meeting after the weekly to discuss the approaches, then. You and Raspberry, at least."

Orange proceeds on without waiting for any acknowledgement.

"Blueberry, you're next. How's the status page shaping up? The internal one, I mean."

Permalink

"Grafana configuration is now mostly done. I just got the http endpoint error and timing graphs to show on our custom status page as well."

Blueberry smiles briefly before checking the assigned ticket.

"I'm supposed to work on outage alarms next, but we haven't specified that at all. Do we actually want PagerDuty-style phone calls when something goes wrong? Seems a bit early for that, but it would be good to have the integration ready for when we'll have actual uptime targets. Not a priority right now, I'd say."

Permalink

"Agreed on prioritization. We need a way to notice if something's broken though. Maybe we should still send emails for those? Or we could have a status screen in the lobby?"

Permalink

Apricot thinks that the CEO looks a bit too eager to have a status screen.

"A Slack bot would probably be the best way to do this.", he interjects.

Permalink

Nod. "Let's do that."

Orange waits until Blueberry nods too, and the proceeds onto the next person.

"Raspberry? You we're looking at the interface, too?"

Total: 10
Posts Per Page: