CANCELED - With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Decision-making by Product Owners Instead of Teams
Description
The University of Notre Dame Libraries recently released a new website, after a year of planning and development. Everything about the website is new, including the technical infrastructure (headless CMS with a React front end on AWS architecture), QA integration (we have formal QA for the first time!), content (mostly, though not entirely, rewritten text and new images), and importantly, the decision-making process. Instead of having a team of representative librarians and staff from across the library discuss each issue and share decision making, two product owners (who weren't web librarians, developers, or administrators) did the work that teams had done in the past: we gathered the majority of feedback and, in consultation with an advisory team, the developers, and library administrators (plus a fair amount of spidey-sense), made the majority of decisions. Moving to product owners was a success, and it evolved over the course of the project, as we learned about what worked and what didn't. This presentation will share more about how we used product owners, what roles other staff played in the project, what we learned, and how we plan to use product owners for more projects in the future.
CANCELED - With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Decision-making by Product Owners Instead of Teams
The University of Notre Dame Libraries recently released a new website, after a year of planning and development. Everything about the website is new, including the technical infrastructure (headless CMS with a React front end on AWS architecture), QA integration (we have formal QA for the first time!), content (mostly, though not entirely, rewritten text and new images), and importantly, the decision-making process. Instead of having a team of representative librarians and staff from across the library discuss each issue and share decision making, two product owners (who weren't web librarians, developers, or administrators) did the work that teams had done in the past: we gathered the majority of feedback and, in consultation with an advisory team, the developers, and library administrators (plus a fair amount of spidey-sense), made the majority of decisions. Moving to product owners was a success, and it evolved over the course of the project, as we learned about what worked and what didn't. This presentation will share more about how we used product owners, what roles other staff played in the project, what we learned, and how we plan to use product owners for more projects in the future.