18.2 Dev Review 🤙
This section includes a reminder to have a mentor call 🤙
In this step, you'll spend some time with an experienced developer to review your mockups and stories from a technical standpoint. This is a rare opportunity to simulate the experience of collaborating with developers, so make sure you prepare for your meeting.
It is always best practice for project managers to review their plans with the development team; the developers have insights and ideas that might impact choices you make about how to solve your users' problems. They might also introduce new problems you weren't aware of, like technical dependencies or not having specialized developers to do the work you were planning.
To simulate this real-world situation, you can expect your discussion with the developer to reveal some problems with the project; problems you'll have to address by revising your plans. While finding problems might feel frustrating—after all, you already put in a lot of work!—this is something project managers experience all the time. Things rarely go according to plan, so working through a simulation like this one will be great preparation for your upcoming job interviews.
If you're unable to find any developers you can join the Open Bootcamp developer community at webdevopen.com. Connect with a developer from the community and politely ask for some time to review your work.
As you meet with the developer, make sure you've planned out what you want to discuss and have all the mockups and stories ready to share with them. You'll have 45 minutes, and you want to make the most out of this time.
Here are some points to consider as you prepare:
- How can you present the problem so your developers can understand what you're trying to solve? Having them understand the problem can help them come up with better solutions.
- Are all your mockups and stories detailed and specific? Are you ready to share with your developer all the information they will need to go build this feature?
- Are there any stories or designs that you want to discuss in detail? Think about any details you are unsure about or ones that you suspect could be complicated to develop.
- What are some of the potential risks you could face when developing this feature? How can you discuss those with your developers to prevent or mitigate them?
- What kinds of questions will your developers ask about the stories, designs, or other parts of this project? Be prepared to give them details and explain your priorities.
- Make sure to prep your own questions for the developer. What do you need to know to make the best decisions? What can they help you figure out?
Following this experience, consider what you learned from talking to a developer and how your interactions went. You might also want to make some notes about this in your notebook. Make sure to implement the feedback from the developer as you revise your plans for the final submission, especially their explanations of trade-offs and priorities.
Mentor Call 6 🤙
Time for your sixth mentor call. Although you could get mentored from any free platform online, we recommend ADPList as it's free and boasts a huge community of product experts. You might have to signup to it's platform (which is again free) and schedule a mentor call from the ADPList platform itself.
Schedule a mentor call with an ADPList product mentor. ADPList provides free mentorships for everyone and is an amazing platform to learn and meet experts. Please ensure you take mentor calls with importance. Mentors play a crucial role in your career. Do not ask mentors to review assignments. They are only meant to guide you and give you tips on your growth. These are optional calls as well.
Let the mentors know beforehand what the call is about. Share you questions and let them know you are a bootcamp student. Again refrain from asking assignment related questions. They aren't meant to review your assignments.
Below are the list of mentors that we have collaborated with at PMcademy.
Looking for more mentors ?
You can choose to get mentored from any other mentor as well. Visit this link to find more product mentors from ADPList. However note that not everyone is aware of PMcademy, it that case let them know beforehand about PMcademy.com and about your meeting agenda.