Personas - shared vision for our projects

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Fri Oct 26 18:23:44 UTC 2012


On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 02:53:35PM +0200, Jiří Stránský wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> while I was reading the Winged Monkey thread, I realized we might be missing a key thing in our projects - some shared vision of what are we building and who are we building it for. 

Yes! I agree 100% with this.

One of the things I was just realizing recently myself is that many of
our use cases seem to involve enterprise users who are familiar with the
cloud. That's okay in and of itself -- indeed, that represents most of
our customers.

But what about someone who has heard about "The Cloud" and wants to try
it out? How is our application useful to them? (I'm not saying it isn't,
just that we have never really made the case.) Why should they even care
about "cross-cloud"? What about someone that just uses VMs for testing
things and wants a good way to manage them?

Maybe some of those are obscure examples. I haven't read the links you
present yet. :)



> I started reading the WM thread being sceptic and gradually moved to a point "yeah, it starts to make sense to build this thing". But I had to do a lot of thinking and read a lot of explanations before I was able to come up in my mind with ideas of concrete people who would actually want to use Winged Monkey. I think this lack of clear vision and target users causes some confusion in communication and lengthy mailing list threads where we come to a shared point of view quite slowly. I'm thinking of whole Aeolus, not just Winged Monkey.

This is an interesting point. Reading Hugh's description of what
Conductor is, I wasn't sure if I even agreed. That makes me think that
there's more than a little improvement to clarify these things.

> I don't think our scrum user stories are enough to provide us with a shared point of view. They state what is the purpose of each feature, but they don't give us any idea *who* will need such thing in the first place. "As a user, I want..." is not enough, because I still don't know who is the user. And this leaves room for endless debates about whether features are needed or not.

In addition to this, I think we're not always doing a good job of
writing user stories. I've seen (and, admittedly, written) some Redmine
tasks that are really just, "As a user, I want to have <feature>." I
don't want to derail your thread with this point, though, but it's
something to keep in mind IMHO.

> 2) - Hmm, I think John, the IT infrastructure administrator in the small business company, would want to use just /this component/ and have it communicating with his /that app/.

Yes, I think this would be fantastic.

The only thing is... We can't even agree on what to name our projects.
Now we have to name imaginary people? ;) I vote for Klaus, the
staplerfahrer, though I'm not sure that he has any use for Aeolus.

(I'm mostly joking, of course. It's Friday afternoon. The type of thing
you describe would be immensely useful.)

> I should also admit here that personas are a lot of work and it is probably going to have to be done by someone else than me, as I have no experience with the business side of cloud computing so I have little knowledge of what users/customers might need. But "As an engineer, I'd like to have personas in order to make community decisions more effectively and efficiently" :)

Ideally, I think this would be a team effort. I think engineers should
be involved, surely, but it would be also interesting to get feedback
from people like PM or the upstream community. (Or, really, anyone with
input.) I'd be happy to help!

-- Matt



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