21 ms·
Don't panic. As someone who's done this a few times, this is typical for non pure tech companies. Go looking for people in your company that are using the produ
by twunde 7y ago
Don't panic. As someone who's done this a few times, this is typical for non pure tech companies. Go looking for people in your company that are using the product or supporting it. Typically this will be customer/client services and potentially business operations. They should be able to talk to about what doesn't work, what works well, the workarounds that have been adopted, etc. You should also talk to account managers and marketing/sales to get a feel about what clients are asking for (what features are wanted, what's missing, major flaws). Do go hunting for old specs, wireframes etc since often these are floating around but not in a central location. I've been amazed at how often these show up AFTER I've finished wrapping up a project. Often these may be owned by other departments. Make sure to ask IT to not delete the old PM's accounts but give you access to their documents and email so you can try and find old docs and email threads about decisions.
Now for the good news. With the old PM gone, you now have a blank slate to make changes, you're not beholden to their old decisions.
- mattmanser 7y agoI've also had great success sitting down with a real user for an hour and getting them to go through what they do. One particularly memorable product I did that with, I was sitting with a low level, call center type employee who was taking me through their daily job, and he pointed to a frequently needed report on screen and said "this is wrong though, I'll show you how we get the right report". He then proceeded to fire up SQL Server Management Studio, connected to the production db and ran a script he'd been given. All of them had read permission to the entire, extremely large, highly sensitive, db. Because that was apparently easier for one of the devs before me than fixing the bug. That company was bought for 9 figures a few months after that, just goes to show shoddy code and practices certainly isn't a reflection of value.
- rayray07 7y agoThanks Matt, good idea - I will plan in some meet and greets with key stakeholders to watch and listen how they use/think of the product.
- rayray07 7y agoThanks Twunde, this is useful. I'm trying to build a 'product manual' or similar, which will cover all the key items. Any suggestions for 'chapters'? i.e Service model, Key stakeholders.