1. Understand what people need.
  2. Address the whole experience, from start to finish.
  3. Make it simple and intuitive.
  4. Build the service using agile and iterative practices.
  5. Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery.
  6. Assign one leader and hold that person accountable.
  7. Bring in experienced teams.
  8. Choose a modern technology stack.
  9. Deploy in a flexible hosting environment.
  10. Automate testing and deployments.
  11. Manage security and privacy through reusable processes.
  12. Use data to drive decisions.
  13. Default to open.

That sounds like a list anyone creating something online should follow. Would you guess it’s actually from the US government Digital Services Playbook? Great work by Steven VanRoekel and his team, which I had the pleasure of meeting last time I was in DC. Hat tip: Anil Dash.

5 thoughts on “You Won’t Believe Who Wrote This Product Checklist

  1. Doing a one-man team simple product development and this list looks good. Practicing 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 and 12, planning 13 once I get to v1.0. Not sure how to go about pushing 8 but WP JSON API, and kimonolabs.com looks like they’ll play nice together.

    Product is a simple side project: WordPress Newsboard (currently) at http://bowo.io/wpnews/ One week ish after launch (two days initial build), and data increasingly says about 75% are returning visitors (sample size is about 10 to 20 visitors a day though).

    Thanks for sharing Matt!… Too bad I didn’t get to shake your hand at recent http://wpjkt.org meetup. Obviously too many competitors! Great talk back there. Thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a whole lot. 🙂

  2. Doing a one-man team simple product development and this list looks good. Practicing 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 and 12, planning 13 once I get to v1.0. Not sure how to go about pushing 8 but WP JSON API, and kimonolabs.com looks like they’ll play nice together.

    Product is a simple side project: WordPress Newsboard (currently) at http://bowo.io/wpnews/ One week ish after launch (two days initial build), and data increasingly says about 75% are returning visitors (sample size is about 10 to 20 visitors a day though). So, looks like this meets no.1.

    Thanks for sharing Matt!… Too bad I didn’t get to shake your hand at recent http://wpjkt.org meetup. Obviously too many competitors! Great talk back there. Thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a whole lot. 🙂

  3. Seems awfully broad for a government document. If I were to venture a guess each of those 13 items has several hundred pages of supporting information written at a fifth-grade level explaining how to order the office supplies necessary to support that step.

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