Project + Division Sync Meeting notes

Design

• A bit rocky to onboard designers

• A few dropped off

• Making some progress on each project

  • Trying to keep everyone in contact

• Biggest issue: skill and time required from each designer

  • It take a lot of time to really learn, and not many can

  • Projects aren’t moving as fast as they could be

  • Trends - issue where engineers need design to keep working on front end

• Hilary ran design workshops, people still dropped off

• Engagement level impacted by people being busy

• Does 1:1 with some designers, but not a lot of people are aware of this

Marketing

• Marketing just started

• Posting on social media

• physical tabling - want to do it again

  • not many people on campus, need to do it again at a better time

• Want to promote Planner primarily

• Trying to get more videos of team meetings

• Wanted to know analytics of who is using what product

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API Team

• Semester going well

• Has been drop-off

  • 3-4 left, but to be expected (that’s why we recruited so heavily)

• High engagement at the meetings, lots of attendance

• Are getting a lot of work done, but the number of contributors is lower than the number of people at meetings

• Josh making his time and help available, people aren’t bringing up major issues or reaching out. People are likely busy

  • People are introverted

• In last 2 weeks even, lots of PR’s merged in

• People are contributing, so it’s okay if not everyone is contributing for the sake of velocity

• Jupiter org endpoints ready soon

• Lots of work getting done - tooling, fixed requisite parsing

  • Lots of stuff for other teams

Engineering

• Jason Working with Planner to ensure they're doing okay

  • newer engineers are asking questions

  • Gotten lots of DM’s over the last week

• Overall engineering on all our teams going well

Jupiter

• Engineering going well

• not much drop-off

  • A few people who did drop off are starting to contribute now

  • Need to talk to a few more who are silent still

• Product tabling soon

• Product wants posters and flyers

  • Kickoff slide has most of the info they want

• Team wants a social media post also

• Design

  • A few very interested designers

  • New designer to be added to the confluence

  • Have some designers falling behind due to not being as experienced

    • Pairing them up

  • Hilary: Send them to office hours if they're having trouble

  • Making progress

  • They seem to understand what’s expected of them

• Started doing more standup

  • Not just engineering - want Product and Design people there

  • Engineers had a say in the survey

• Haven’t needed to assign tasks directly, people are understanding what to do and how difficult tasks are

  • Product and Design aren’t good at this - don't use Jira

  • Hard to break down tasks

  • Don’t like to just add stuff into the sprint

• Learning design process

  • Give engineers a Figma file and let them work

Trends

• Trends a bit slow

  • Design is a bottleneck

  • Getting stuff done by Sunday

  • Engineers working on backlog of issues

  • Now that we’re getting stuff from design, engineering has work to do, so engagement increase is expected

• Skedge

  • Currently implementing the redesign from Hilary

  • been assigning it to people recently

  • Done within the next few weeks

• Trends

  • Redesign will take longer

  • Product will be critiquing them

• Troubles with people being engaged, and stuff doesn’t happen during the week always

  • Does the project need to provide something, or what?

• Started doing standup

  • Increase engagement in the meetings

  • Not sure how to break down larger problems of “Create a design” into tickets to give to designers

Design + Projects

• Provide resources on confluence

  • can’t make them learn design

• All Hilary can do is be available and give resources and guidance

• A bit rocky to try to start communication with each project

  • Too many people

  • Worked best with less designers to keep track of

  • People not utilizing office hours

• Telling projects what to do for the next steps

  • Leaving it up to the leads for timeline

  • Tries to balance more skilled designers

• Hilary can’t be at every project meeting

• Designer’s next steps

  • William: biggest hurdle is that they're told “Go do this” and breaking it into specific tasks has been hard

  • Jake: “work w/ designers to understand each task?”

  • William: might be best to present issue of breaking tasks down to designers & see what they think

  • Jake: ditto

  • Hilary: I agree it’s best to see what solution the designers come up w/

    • IMHO biggest problem is designers don’t check Discord enough

  • David: do you agree w/ that statement?

  • William: yup

    • Have 3 product members consistently getting tasks done

    • Their next steps rely on having designs for designers

    • Had previous issues w/ keeping them engaged but now it’s fine

  • David: are designers showing up to meetings?

  • William: they generally show up to meetings; difficult to get ahold of outside

    • Now has their phone numbers lolol

    • Needed for urgent matters

  • David: suggest checking Discord over text

  • David: feature specification documents would be helpful w/ designer to engineer translations?

  • William: yes, once redesign is done we can break it down; aiming to complete over Nebula Hack

• How are we doing giving deliverables to designers?

  • William: doing good; have enthusiastic product people, having issues contacting designers

  • Jake: is design the main bottleneck now?

  • William: yes

  • Jake: it seems difficult to get product and design engaged?

  • Jake: is design the bottleneck for Jupiter?

  • Ruben: not as much; referred them to existing designs & Nebula design standards to help them get trained

  • Ruben: product has been primarily focused on the survey but no bottle necks atm

  • Jake: plan to hold small group meetings w/ Hilary, Jake, and William/Ruben

Including People at Product & Design Meetings

• Jake: increase engagement in meetings & seems like it’s difficult to integrate product & design in team meetings. Thoughts?

• Ruben: standup + people taking feedback helps

  • Only engineering & design can make Jupiter meetings

  • Product meets separately on Sunday; they have good meeting notes; struggle to get them to use Discord

• Jake: are other product people using teams?

  • William: maybe in the summer, but not anymore

  • Hilary: design people are trying but need a little “push” to check Discord consistently

  • Jupiter product team meet on Teams & take notes on Microsoft Word

Summary

• We have a good starting point to discuss team structure & communications

• Aim to make sure each each design & product member has something to present at each meeting

• Set up meetings w/ heads & relevant lead to discuss integrating design & product