This session provides and overview and lessons learned from senior UX, product, and software development consultants' experiences in switching from consulting to actually conceiving, designing, developing and ultimately launching a complex consumer application in dating called MinIDates.com. It turns out that our extensive industry experience and past successes couldn't have prepared us for all that we encountered and learned when trying to develop and launch our own consumer startup. We'd like to share what we learned for future teams to benefit! Oxford Technology Ventures, LLC is a boutique user experience and product strategy consulting firm in New York whose members are seasoned veterans in UX, Internet, and software development. Our clients range from large Fortune 100's to small startups, and we've worked on and helped successfully launch or overhaul hundreds of products and services over the years. Like many in the consulting/ agency/ services business, we were feeling "startup envy" and wanted go develop and launch our own service. MinIDates.com was initially conceived as a showcase company case study in superior UX, cutting edge mobile tech, and Lean and Agile development processes where we wouldn't be constrained by our clients' preferences, implementation methods, and product direction revisions. We embarked on developing MiniDates.com in January 2011 after several months of conceiving the product, and ultimately launched it in beta 14 months later- when we had originally thought it would take us only 3-4 months to MVP! This session describes the process we went through - what we tried that worked and didn't, what we should have done that we didn't, and what we encountered that we couldn't have foreseen- in the belief that we can help other UX and product-focused startups and Agile teams be more effective practitioners.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/minidates-otv-agile2012-finalHR.pdf
