OpenDialog: Week 7 - A clear view of the path ahead

As we roll into week 8 of the OpenDialog 1.0 journey, we are now well into Sprint 3 - which kicked off on Friday last week and things are shaping up nicely.

During sprint 2 we started to see a number of the big ideas take shape from both a visual and approach point of view. Our Head of Conversation UX, Maaike Coppens, has been doing an incredible job of bringing ideas to life. She’s been collaborating with the application front end squad to define the implementation path for the new no-code, no flow conversation builder - our exciting new feature for the OpenDialog 1.0. We can’t wait to show it to you!

In my week 5 post, I mentioned how important I believe it is for us to undertake spike work to help us de-risk the work ahead of us - specifically a rebuild of our Conversation Engine. Well, I think the big lesson I learnt from this sprint is ensuring that we all agree when a spike should stop and working software starts. 

On reflection, allowing this spike work to morph into working software was a necessary path to take that has set us up with a clearer pathway forward for the next three sprints but it was noisy and distracting for the team. However, I truly believe it was the right thing to do for the product and the overall project goal to enable us to deliver OpenDialog 1.0. 

Last time I also mentioned that we had re-surfaced the importance of spending time reflecting on the past sprint. The team have reacted positively to this, and the async way of sharing thoughts has seen good levels of engagement and lots of insight shared each time. It’s great to see no repeated stops/starts from the previous sprint but there are new ones that we surfaced this sprint that we now want to work on.

A personal reflection… One thing I’ve really struggled with for the past 2 sprints in my hybrid role as Scrum Master / Product Owner is backlog estimation. It’s something I’ve always sworn by with all client work in past guises to help make decisions around prioritisation. 

However, due to the pace, we’re moving at and the ever-evolving backlog items, there just is not the time nor level of detail for that to happen upfront.

As so, we’re relying on a tradeoff between scope and fidelity for each item i.e. here’s what we need to achieve (Sprint goal) but the fidelity of that is variable.

We’ve felt that this has/will enable us to move fast and deliver the breadth of features required in these early stages. We will then re-focus back on the key areas in priority order to bring the fidelity required in an iterative manner. I’d be really keen to hear how others have dealt with this situation?

Right, that’s me out for another week and back focusing on readying ourselves for sprint 4 - it never stops and I love it! 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 release news on opendialog.ai.