OpenSocial Grilling

Sometimes when the grill gets really hot, you just have to move the food quickly without necessarily having a complete plan. 

Last week, Google announced the OpenSocial APIs.  We had been working for about four weeks on this, and the application evolved tremendously during that time.  For contrast, here's my original mockup that we used to discuss the use case and features:

So in about one month, we went from a rough concept (with a pretty ugly mockup) to really nice application.  Along the way, we did lots of iteration and even some very basic UI and concept testing.

From a product management point of view, we didn't bother building detailed iterations.  The team was small, and the API information from Google was very sparse in the beginning.  We basically just set a goal of having the primary features working by the middle of October so that we could spend the end of the month focusing on integrating the API's.

As it turned out, that plan worked pretty well because the API's ended up being a fair bit different than we guessed.  Iteration planning definitely has a place, but it is important to recognize situations where there isn't enough information to make a plan of any value.

Here's what the "canvas page" view of Didja Hear!? looked like on Friday when OpenSocial was announced:

 

So where does that leave us now that Google has made their announcement?  As you might have guessed, a lot is still changing.  So the team is still working to a list of top priorities and adapting to the changes in APIs.

This is about as agile as product development gets, and we're staying on top of this by chatting and drawing sketches about new issues and use cases. 

For now, the grill is so hot we've just got to focus on making sure nothing gets burned while keeping an eye on how and when this gets served up for everyone to enjoy!