How we build Redfin.com

1
How we build Redfin.com

• Matt Goyer
• Lead Product Manager

2
What Well Chat About

• Who Am I?
• How We Do It At Redfin
• Who does what
• Team structure
• What next?
• Offsite
• Focus group
• Survey
• Spec it, Code it, Try it, Test it
• Release it
• Feedback
• Conclusion

3
Who Am I?

• University of Waterloo
• B.Math (Computer Science)
• Distracted by startups
• Microsoft
• Program Manager on Windows Media Center
• Redfin
• Lead Product Manager for Search

4
Who Does What?

• Program/Product Manager (PM)
• Customer representative
• Co-ordinates design, development and QA
• Designer
• Makes it pretty
• Software Development Engineer (SDE)
• Writes the code
• Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET or
  QA)
• Tests the code by writing more code

5
Team Structure

• Feature Teams
• Commerce
• Data
• Query and Statistics
• Search
• Made up of
• 1 PM
• 1 QA
• 3 Developers

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What Do We Do Next?

• Listen to Customers
• Surveys
• Emails from customers
• Forums
• Blogs
• Watch Competitors
• Watch Related Companies

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Offsite

• What happens
• Presentations
• Brainstorm
• Think outside the box
• What is produced
• Vision
• Goals
• Tentative feature plan

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Focus Group

• Invite 10 customers
• Two hours
• Talk about what they like
• Talk about what they dont like
• Summarize that night
• Send out plan

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From Idea to Booked Work

• Survey
• Confirm plan
• Tools
• Zoomerang
• Survey Monkey
• Communicate plan
• Present to leadership team
• Present to company

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Functional Specification

• Problems and Opportunities
• Feature Breakdown and Priorities
• User Scenarios
• Success Metrics
• User Interface Design
• Requirements Dependencies
• Reporting Analytics
• Performance

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Schedule

• Why?
• A commitment
• Tool to track progress
• Rule of thirds
• Plan
• Code
• Test

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Code It

• Design spec
• What did we forget?
• Track against schedule
• Have fun!

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User Test It

• How?
• Hallway usability
• Usability test
• What?
• Recruit participants
• Draw up a plan
• Dont lead the witness

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Quality Assurance

• Bugs?
• No one is perfect
• Bugs not all equal
• Priority/Severity
• Database
• Finding them
• Test Plan
• Test Pass
• Bug Bash
• Triage

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Release

• Whats driving you?
• Quality vs. Date
• Get to zero bugs
• Release Candidates (RC0, RC1,)
• Release to operations (RTO)
• Release to web (RTW)
• Get the word out
• Press release
• Engage bloggers
• Social network

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Feedback

• Numbers
• Analytics
• Metrics
• People
• Tech support
• Forums
• Blogs

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Recommended Reading

• Joel On Software
• By Joel Spolsky
• Also a blog http//www.joelonsoftware.com
• The Art of Project Management
• By Scott Berkun

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Questions?

• mail_at_mattgoyer.com
• http//blog.mattgoyer.com