There and back: the road of product discovery

Product strategy is evolving and becoming less clear, as is the ‘product roadmap’. Requirements, business needs and user expectations are changing at a rapid pace. This session focuses on the process and thinking of product discovery and exploration to inform your product roadmap by running multiple projects that are all connected to the problems that need to be solved.

This case study will cover:

• brainstorming and idea generation
• understanding and getting team alignment on the problem
• executing a high tempo prototyping process to develop ideas
• learning from the prototypes with real humans to get feedback in user testing
• incorporating what was learned in the product roadmap
• success stories and project examples
• dual track scrum to maintain discovery as a routine part of your process • leading a cross-functional team of designers, engineers and product managers

About David Hoang

David Hoang is a product design professional with more than a decade’s experience. He focuses on mobile, wearables and emerging technology. He’s currently the Product Design Lead at One Medical Group and Studio Manager at The Rock Tumbler Collective.

He was previously an early member of ExactTarget’s global accounts team, founder of a mobile product agency, Lead UX Designer at HTC and Director of Mobile Design at Black Pixel. He has worked with Expedia, Inspirato, Nike, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Whole Foods and others.

David has a BFA in visual arts and his work is influenced a lot by art history, narrative and popular culture. His design leadership style is built on teams of cross-functional people who are focused, passionate, and disciplined. He’s based in Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California.

Sorry for the super late notice everyone, but I'm going to have to postpone the meeting until next week. But, in doing so, we'll have Marc Charbonneau back from his trip to SF and he went to Layers while he was there! So he'll give us a recap of the highlights of Layers and then we'll go over the "can't miss" sessions and highlights of WWDC 2016.

Hope to see you there!

Ryan

NOTE: We'll be meeting on Tuesday night this month!

Jon Bulava (Editor in Chief, Developer Relations @ Twitter) is in town for Write the Docs and is going to come tell us about what's new with Twitter/Fabric:

"Twitter was born on mobile, and we know what it takes to design, release, and grow a great mobile app.  We've built Fabric to make it easy for developers to build the best apps. The toolset addresses some of the most common iOS development challenges: stability, analytics, revenue, identity, and deployment. Installation takes just minutes and most features only require a few lines of code - so you spend less time managing SDKs and more time building the best experience for your users."

Looking forward to it, and I hope to see you there (a night early!)

Ryan

This month we'll hear from our very own Jeff Boek (mobile developer at Opal Labs and co-organizer of this group) about Models, Views, and... what's that other thing? He'll tell us about his journey through iOS Application Architectures and what he came out the other side with.

See you there!

How do you handle concurrency/asynchronous calls in your projects? Are you using NSOperations? GCD? Promises? React? Your own pattern?

Come chat with a bunch of other iOS devs about it and share your experience and learn from others' in a round table style discussion about concurrency in iOS!

Are you a beginner, just getting started in the land of iOS development, and have some questions you'd like to ask a group of more advanced developers?

Are you an iOS developer that's been doing it a while and have lots of juicy knowledge to share with some beginners?

Are you somewhere in between these two and just want to hear and contribute to a conversation that those two groups of people might spark?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, that's what I'd like to do this month! This will be an extremely free-form meeting as we'll need to adapt to what you all bring to it. Have some code you'd like some help with? Bring it. Have some burning questions that have been hard to find just by Googling? Bring 'em! Have some really cool tips you think would help other developers, but you've never really found the right platform from which to share them? This is it! Bring 'em!

Show up at 6 for some pre-meeting chatting/networking. Meeting starts at 6:30. We usually wrap up around 8-8:30 and head to Bunk Bar for post-meeting beers.

See you there!

I got an AppleTV Dev Kit so I thought it'd be good to have this month's meeting based on that. I'll go over what it took to port the app that we did for the WatchKit Workshop a few months ago (Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock... aka RoShamBo) to tvOS. Here's the repo if you wanted to preview it.

If you've been working on an AppleTV app and want to share with the group, there will be plenty of time for that as well.

I need to double check with my lawyer... but I'll probably bring the device in so anyone who's interested can get some hands-on time with it. I'm also happy to run code on it if you've got something you want to try out.

Hope to see you there!

Ryan

This month I'd like to talk about Tests and how much (or how little) everyone actually uses tests in their workflow in practice.

I know Xcode probably made a test target for your app, but have you filled it with tests? What kinds of tests? How many tests do you have? Do you run them on every commit? Every build? Every submission to the App Store? Do you use a 3rd party testing framework? Which one? What parts of the app do you test? Do you do UI Testing? Unit testing? Integration testing?

Come listen to others' answers to these questions (and more) and provide some answers (or questions) of your own!

Agenda:

• Doors open at 6pm

•Freeform chatting and networking until the meeting starts at 6:30pm

• Post-meeting drinks at Bunk Bar or somewhere else nearby around 8:30pm.

This month I'd like to talk about Tests and how much (or how little) everyone actually uses tests in their workflow in practice.

I know Xcode probably made a test target for your app, but have you filled it with tests? What kinds of tests? How many tests do you have? Do you run them on every commit? Every build? Every submission to the App Store? Do you use a 3rd party testing framework? Which one? What parts of the app do you test? Do you do UI Testing? Unit testing? Integration testing?

Come listen to others' answers to these questions (and more) and provide some answers (or questions) of your own!

Agenda:

• Doors open at 6pm

•Freeform chatting and networking until the meeting starts at 6:30pm

• Post-meeting drinks at Bunk Bar or somewhere else nearby around 8:30pm.

NOTE: I wanted to make sure everyone saw the location difference! We'll be meeting at Plus QA again this month!

ALSO NOTE: We're meeting a week early this month due to some travel conflicts for the organizers ;)

It seems like every year, we see a new database launch. But most of them are designed to work in server environments, not solve the problems that mobile developers face. A database that's truly designed to work on phones, tablets, and watches is going to look different from SQLite -- it will be built on a universal, cross-platform, memory-mapped, thread-safe data representation of data, via a simple and object-oriented API. The focus will be to let developers write apps faster, focus on crafting better experiences, and handle more data locally.

The topic this month is the Swift programming language which has recently gone 1.0 and is quickly becoming a critical skill for iOS development.

We're trying something new for this meeting. Step Christopher will video conference in and give the main talk on Swift and playgrounds.

Afterwards we'll have some time for discussion and a hands on exploration of playgrounds let by one of our own members.

Wow. What a keynote! Way more developer changes than I expected.

And then the shocker of a completely new programming language - Swift.

We'll have plenty to talk about so bring your questions and insights.

We'll try to organize the topics so if there is something you'd like to talk about let me know and you can lead that part of the discussions.

Join us for an evening discussing application and user testing.

This meeting will be at Plus QA in SE where they have just opened acommunity test lab ( http://portlandtestlab.com ) with various iOSand Android devices for developers.

The user testing meeting a few months ago was a huge hit and we aredoing that again. So after we talk about testing on devices we'llbreak into small groups to run user tests on our own apps in afriendly environment.

Thanks in advance PlusQA for supplying the space and pizza and beer.

Agenda:

• Welcome, Intros and announcements

• Community test lab - how it will work and how it is useful

• User testing - bring your apps and devices

• Discussion and socializing