As usual in my undocumented but self-understood process, I will start by iterating steps in the random orders they occur to me, until order forms.
Product design: Have a search engine that lets you ask an MS employee (Gas) and a Google employee (me) any question (the default example will be “Are Microsoft and Google competing?”) Asking a question will search the question base and reveal all the results. Each result is a page on which Gas and I debate one question, with a threaded view that I already designed in my head. Alternatively they may present a new question and we will answer it.
Requirements: Wait, aren’t you supposed to go with requirements first, then design? Answer: this is part of my undocumented process. Basically, until there’s actual serious work to backtrack on, brainstorming involves going through the steps of the process in any order I feel like. As long as I’m not invested in each step, I don’t have to go in order.
These are the requirements for the project:
- As established in Day One of the Mission, our goal is to make this site popular, as an exercise in marketing and creating great products. So we want to get a lot of people interested in the site.
- We don’t want fake interest, so we want people to actually follow the site.
As a result of these requirements, we plan to capitalize on our human resource of being employees at two possibly competing companies by creating a site where people can watch us argue, or possibly agree.
Legal Considerations: I don’t really like the fact that this step has to be in here, but this is one step that should definitely occur at least once before execution. In order to make sure this product is validly managed we will make sure that trademarks are carefully dealt with, and we don’t speak on behalf of our companies. (Google requires me to say I’m not speaking on behalf of the company, for example).
Other steps: Implementation design (i.e. programming language, frameworks to use)