OpenDialog: Week 5 - Getting into the groove

For those of you who haven’t met or heard from me, I’m Adam Fowles, Head of Delivery & Operations here at GreenShoot Labs / OpenDialog - the man with the plan and servant-leader for the team.

As we roll into a snowy (well in the UK at least) week 6, the blizzard that is the OpenDialog 1.0 journey is really picking up as we are now well into Sprint 2 - which kicked off on Friday last week. 

What has happened since the last post by Maaike Coppens on 25th January you ask? Well, Sprint 1 happened, in which we laid the foundations for Sprint 2 and beyond. 

Sprint 1 is all about laying down solid foundations for not just the 1.0 release but also the future of OpenDialog, we focused this block of time on establishing our workflows both amongst our people but also how we write and manage our code.  

Whilst the team were setting the foundations, I, Pat Shone (CTO) and Ronald Ashri (CEO/Product Owner) swarmed on the ‘mad & crazy’ ideas from the past 4 weeks and started to filter them down into cohesive, deliverable chunks ready for review and prioritisation. Not an easy task but a fun challenge that we all revelled in… well I did anyway!

This sprint also saw a really exciting proof of concept (POC) delivered which further validated our thinking that OpenDialog will be:

“a straightforward configurable admin interface - a dynamic #freeflow conversation builder - easily editable content management, and much more!” - is the correct route to take. 

Thanks to our Frontend Developer, Tom Cummings, for delivering and bringing Maaike along with the wider team a lot of joy last Thursday. Now onto building out the real thing across Sprint 2 and 3 - which I’m sure will be fun and challenging! Very exciting.

So far in this journey, we’ve really seen the value of ‘Spikes’...

“A spike is a product development method originating from Extreme Programming that uses the simplest possible program to explore potential solutions.”

to help us validate OR invalidate our thinking around a problem. These have been timeboxed and with really focused goals. I believe it’s a really important risk mitigator for any product development and for us, it’s proving really important for making decisions as we move forward with OpenDialog. 

As we establish and gel as a product team, I want to ensure the team is continually learning and iterating its ways of working. This sprint was the first time in a long time we’ve kept time aside to reflect on how the past few weeks has been. As we’re fully remote, we did this asynchronous, using Google Docs following our show & tell. 

The retrospective shed a lot of light on the success (‘Continues’) but most importantly the ‘Stops’ and ‘Starts’ - which I’ll be focused on working with the team on across Sprint 2 and beyond.

Right, that’s me out for this week. Keep checking back for our regular updates as we take this journey towards OpenDialog 1.0.

If you’re curious about the OpenDialog way of designing conversations: make sure to sign up for our newsletter on opendialog.ai.