Most of us, Product people working directly with development teams, are involved with agile methodologies. That is, Scrum , Kanban and a variety of other methodologies, processes and frameworks that help us achieve the results we are looking for when it comes to developing digital products.
Within the Product universe, there are two major milestones that define the process of creating a product: Discovery and Delivery.
Making a correlation with these two milestones, we can associate Upstream with Discovery , which are stages that aim to understand , mature and validate our ideas/hypotheses before moving on to the development itself.
Downstream would be associated with Delivery , since we evaluate our hypotheses and have a backlog generated from the Discovery processes. At this stage, we can deliver to the Engineering team what they need to do , develop and deliver , all with great clarity.
Representation of Upstream and Downstream flow
Representation of Upstream and Downstream flow. Source .
Zoom in
If we look more deeply into a Product team, we will notice that our kazakhstan's basic information goal is to have very well-defined stages , which go from ideation to final delivery.
Furthermore, correctly mapping these steps increases the visibility of the work as a whole. In other words, it exposes bottlenecks, points out idleness and, most importantly, whether the team has a healthy and mature workflow.
In practice
I decided to use Trello to illustrate how we can set up a product-oriented workflow , with Discovery and Delivery as macro views. The same board, or derivatives of it, can be created in other tools (such as Jira, or even on a physical board with post-its ).
Upstream and Downstream in Trello
Upstream and Downstream in Trello. Frame link .
Explaining our rays :
Backlog : basically, these are non-prioritized demands or needs. Everything that we may or may not work on one day is our large bank of ideas for our product;
Discovery : this is what came out of the backlog and needs to be studied, investigated and deepened. Until the entire product discovery is finished, the card will not leave this lane;
Negotiation Refinement: After Discovery is done, it is time to actually write the user story. Document everything that is necessary and important so that the development team can actually act on the demand;
Technical Refinement: Are you finished with the negotiation refinement? Have you held all the necessary meetings and documented everything that needs to be documented? Then the card goes to the technical refinement lane, where the Engineering team will technically dissect what needs to be done, leave everything documented and ready to be developed;
To do: everything that has already been technically refined and can be sent to the development pipeline;
In development: here are the cards of the activities that are being developed by the engineering team;
In testing: here are the cards of the tasks that have been completed and are being tested by the QA team;
Published: here are the cards of all the activities that were validated by the QA team and published in production.
The goal is to have a continuous, logical flow with as few interruptions as possible between stages. In addition, we want to give the team autonomy to manage the activities themselves, controlling the workflow and delivery. Finally, by managing the team well, we can provide honest visibility of everything that is happening within the product development cycle.
Roles and responsibilities
It is not an absolute rule , but, in general, we can use the 80/20 scale to understand which part of the Product team works in the Upstream and Downstream stages.
Always remembering that our work is collaborative . Just as we can bring the Engineering team to participate in Discovery dynamics, the Product team can help with testing and validations together with the Tech team .
My suggestion
Every good process only makes sense if it somehow contributes to your reality . Before putting anything into practice, talk to the whole team, understand their pain points and needs, and try to analyze scenarios until, in fact, using a workflow like this makes sense .
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