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##Building a Useful, User-Friendly Project/"Product"

So, you want to build a brand-new open-source project. Great! Use this stakeholder interview questions list (derived from this) to ensure that the project you build is as great as possible from a product, innovation, and usability perspective.

Also recommended: check out Mozilla's Open Canvas, which presents a very similar approach in a nifty canvas format!

####1. PROJECT VISION

  • What is your vision for this project?
  • What defines “success” for this project?
  • What are the potential pitfalls (i.e. what keeps you up at night about this project)?
  • Do you actually need the open-source community to help you with this project?
  • What do you need: more
    • devs building features/functionality?
    • Code review?
    • Doc help?
    • Product users?
  • What does your project MVP (minimum viable product) look like?

####2. VALUE PROPOSITION

  • What problems are you solving for users?
  • What are the main “why you should use this” message points?
  • What are the most innovative features?

####3. USERS: OVERVIEW Use your own experience on this one to get started, then find more internally. Then go externally as you build the product vision.

  • Who are the different types of users? Could be:
    • Zalando users (examples): other teams, other departments within tech, other departments outside of tech, etc.
    • non-Zalando users (examples): startups, small companies, big companies, OAuth2 users, devs using a specific language/library/framework/etc., “site reliability engineers,” “front-end engineers working in a microservices environment,” etc.
  • Who are the primary target users?
    • Background?
    • Defining Attributes?
    • Use cases/recipes?

####3a. USER RESEARCH We strongly recommend that you conduct preliminary interviews with potential stakeholders and users to ensure that your project vision aligns with their needs.

User research helps you to avoid duplication/building something in a silo; technical debt, and poor craftsmanship; and to gain efficiency, maximum usability/adoption/maintenance, and excellent craftsmanship. We have these resources available internally and are working with product to make them available ASAP.

####3b. USABILITY PROCESS & WORKFLOW

  • What is the current relationship between you/your project team and your potential users of your project?
  • How will you engage with your project’s potential users to tell them about the project and keep them informed of updates/new features/etc?
    • Examples: LinkedIn groups, direct contact with likely users (in personal networks), social media, meetups, conferences
  • What are the steps you plan to take to increase engagement?
  • Do you have a plan for:
    • Answering issues?
    • Reviewing PRs from outside your own team?
    • Asking for PRs from outside your own team (contributor guidelines, priority bugs/issues/features)
    • Rejecting PRs you don’t want?
    • For the short term (next three months), how can you manage this work so that you respond to PRs/issues/questions within 48-72 hours?
    • For the long term (six months from now), will this plan still be feasible?

####4. COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

  • What similar tools are in use today internally?
  • What similar tools are already developed and open-source?
  • What are their relative strengths/weaknesses?
  • How is this offering different?

####5. KPI ANALYSIS AND SUCCESS INDICATORS How will you be define and measure success in terms of gaining and keeping users?

####6. FUTURE FEATURES

  • What are bad results for the user? (If an experience doesn’t go well, what happens?)
  • How will you communicate with and involve your users long-term to ensure you’re still serving their needs with this project?
  • What else do you think your users would want this project to do?