When it comes to development, managers and executives immiately recall. The accumulat array of tasks that are waiting for their turn, unprictable deadlines. For their implementation, which tend to constantly change, strain relations with the IT department, which uses the “friend or foe. System, and many other problems that slow down business development. To solve all these problems, it is necessary to learn how to correctly set tasks and communicate with developers. Nikolay Khlebinsky, CEO and co-founder of the Retail Rocket platform, talks about. How managers should set tasks so that they are complet on time and in accordance with the assignment.
Setting goals: why it’s difficult and how to learn to do it right
Setting tasks is a pain point for many managers. It seems that you write a task, send it to the developer, and the job is done. But in reality, everything is different. The task is either delay or not complet as expect. Why? Because managers and developers speak different languages.
The manager sees the big picture: what should work, what effect is ne, how much time is available for it. The developer dives into the details: how the button will work, what code nes to be written, what tests ne to be run. When the task is written vaguely, the developer gets lost: he starts guessing what exactly is want from him. Questions accumulate, deadlines are burning, the project stalls.
A common mistake is too general wording
For example: “Add a filter to the list of orders.” Everything is clear to the manager, but the developer is confus: which fields to filter? In what format? Do you ne sorting? How much time do you have? The more questions remain unanswer, the higher the chance of getting the wrong result.
Managers often underestimate technical nuances. It seems that “changing the button to green” is five minutes of work. But behind this button there may be an hour of layout, testing on different devices and design its. The developer spends three times more time than plann, the project does not meet the deadlines.
Why is it important to learn how to set tasks
To avoid breakdowns, stress, and rework. A specific task saves time: it is immiately clear what to do and how. Developers do not have “extra” questions, there is no room for misinterpretations. They can focus on work, and not on trying to understand abstractions.
The ability to set tasks is a skill that immiately makes a project manageable. Tasks are complet on time, developers do not work overtime, the quality of the product increases. And most importantly, chaos goes away, nerves are ruc. The team works harmoniously, because everyone understands what and why they are doing.
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Generate an idea correctly
We are constantly coming up with ideas for refining and improving the product – how to increase the conversion rate of a website, spe up the work of a department, improve business processes, automate some functions, etc. There are buy rich people database even special positions and departments whose responsibilities include monitoring new functionality that appears in leading market players. Another great source of ideas is customer feback. This entire array of data, opinions and suggestions accumulates and requires constant sorting, evaluation and prioritization.
New ideas move the product forward and create competitive advantages, but if every employee immiately went to the developers with their ideas, the latter would simply not have time to work. They would either have to get bogg down in a series of endless discussions about how best to implement this or that moment, and then the development would proce extremely slowly. Or, on the contrary, striving to implement new functions and features as quickly as possible, they would have to code with “crutches”, adding changes without regard for other functionality, which would create difficulties in the future.
Therefore, the first and most important problem to solve is the process of generating ideas.
At Retail Rocket, any team member
Can generate an idea, and it is enter into a specific board in Trello. In our work, we use the Kanban ideology and each process in phone list forum the company, each department, has its own board. Product ideas are enter into a specific column, but to do this, the manager (or any employee) must formulate a short description. That is, not just “limit the number of characters in reviews” or “add a quick order button”, but a clear description from which it will be clear why the new function is ne and how it will be useful.
That is, the person who has an idea does not go straight to the development department, and does not even go to the product manager, but first of all tries to formulate the idea into words. This allows you to avoid many problems and questions during the further development and implementation of new functions.
Therefore, the first rule: A task can be includ
In ideas only if a person is ready to formulate a brief description of it.
Describe the task in as much detail as possible
After that, the product manager comes into play – this is a separate role that deals with product management. The task of this role is to collect requirements and prepare these requirements for transfer to development. That is, the idea creator does not communicate directly with development.
The product manager must create a description that will guide developers in deciding how to implement this particular idea and estimating the time frame for completing the task.
Hence the second rule: the initial function of a product manager is to set and describe a task in such a way as to remove all questions from the development team.
For example, in the case of a task to limit the number of characters in a review, it should be describ what happens if the review is longer than the specifi value, whether there should be a character counter, whether CSS styles change when the counter approaches zero or an error message is shown, etc. All these questions should be answer so that developers do not have to clarify details in the process.
The third rule: the product manager must form a list of those who will test the feature and determine its effectiveness.
This means that, firstly, the idea cannot be develop
Until a list of those who will be responsible for checking it after it leaves the IT department is determin. And secondly, until the criteria for effectiveness are clearly defin.
That is, the employee who orders a new feature must say: “These specific people will test it, and the testing will be consider successful if such an event occurs.”
Evaluate each task
The most important moment that happens at this stage is getting an estimate for the task in money. This means that any task that is given for development should be estimat in money by its creator, i.e. the employee should calculate how much the business will earn on it. Many people think that it is impossible to estimate how much money the implementation of a particular task will bring, but this is not so. Yes, it can be difficult, but experience shows that for most tasks it is quite possible. And if it is impossible, these are the tasks that the business does not ne. If you do not know how much a task will bring, do you really ne to spend time on it?
The fourth rule: every task must be estimat in money
Let’s give an example. There is a trigger scenario – an “abandon cart” letter that an online store sends to users who add an item to the cart but did not place an order. One of the clients ask to send a repeat letter if the price of one of the items in the cart decreas. To calculate the cost of this task, the product manager came with a request to the analysts and ask to calculate how many items the price of which decreases by 5% or more per week. The analysts calculat that about 10% of items left in the cart in the fashion segment decrease their price by 5% or more per week. This means that we can increase the number of abandon cart letters sent by 10% and, accordingly, receive 10% more orders. Thus, in a week we receiv an estimate of the task in money.
And all these processes are happening without the participation of developers, i.e. we do not tear them away from their current tasks.
Prioritize tasks
After assessing the task in money, you ne to get an estimate of the task’s completion time – at this stage, the development department gets involv.
Bas on the description written by the product manager, the developers discuss how the task can be complet and how long it will take. We use Planning Poker for estimation .
After evaluating all the tasks in the backlog, you can prioritize them, i.e. understand which tasks can be complet as quickly as possible and which will bring the greatest financial return. They should be taken on first.
Rule number five: the first tasks to be work on should be those that will bring the greatest financial benefit and require the least amount of time.
Only now does the IT team begin working on the task.
