>The non-technical clients had a hard time communicating their concern's / wants and I had to be physically present at their office to get them to explain the p

>The non-technical clients had a hard time communicating their concern's / wants and I had to be physically present at their office to get them to explain the problem to me effectively. This is a problem which I felt that most startups would face(Or maybe not..). Have you tried video calls and screen sharing? Writing good issues/tickets is not uniformly distributed. Some people are better at it than others. This is valid even in internal technical teams. What we did to reduce this variance is to use issue templates for features/bugs/incidents. This lowered the barrier to write good issues, as the issue author is not met with a blank text zone, but a template that tells them what to write, and where to write it. Quoting myself from another reply[0]. >>> You're welcome. We also are careful to include problem and rationale in our own product internally. When one of us wants a feature or one of our data scientists asks for a feature "I want a button to click and do X", we ask "what are you trying to accomplish?" and focus on the job to be done. People naturally go for solutions/implementations and we can be completely oblivious that the solutions we propose are a result of our knowledge or lack of knowledge. Here's our issue template for features to lower the barrier to write good issues: <!--These are comments and will not be rendered. Please click Preview to check.--> ### Description ---------------- <!--Describe the problem we'll solve. What, where, when, who, why, and how.--> ### Target ---------- <!--Who's the target audience? Who'll enjoy this the most or suffering from lacking this feature the most? Is this a problem you have? Have you talked with other people who have this problem? Is it something that would just be cool? Is it a seed for an idea that can be cool? --> ### Instances ------------- <!--If the problem has happened multiple times, can you describe them--> ### Proposal ------------ <!--What is the plan to solve this problem? Can we guess a solution or have a hunch? Do we have a list of steps? It's okay if they are a bit vague for now. We'll clarify by debating them and adding context to them, reading more about the subject. It's essential to understand that this document serves to capture thoughts and externalize thought processes so we can all tackle the problem more effectively. --> ### Resources ------------- <!--Do you recommend any reading to do about this? Maybe a video to watch for something similar? Maybe a blog post or documentation pages or just a snippet? An image, mock-ups, etc... --> /label ~feature /cc @XX @XY @XZ <<<< - [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208897