Product Development Process

A great deal of my time at EnerNOC was focused on implementing process, both within the User Experience team, as well as the larger product organization.

For me, it started with a simple goal. As an organization, we should love our users. We want to empower them, make them successful, and make them happy.

 

The best way to achieve this, is by talking to users early, and often. We wanted to make sure that we talked to our users as part of the idea generation AND idea validation process.

 

It was important to remind ourselves that we cannot do this alone. Any ideas or features we create by ourselves will be better when we engage our users. When we work together, we make magic.

 

Using this process of user feedback is how I have designed and iterated on areas of the product such as this. Taking both internal and external feedback, and incorporating that feedback into designs that are both functional and beautiful.

To help illustrate what this would mean for the EnerNOC product organization, I tool their existing product development life-cycle, and illustrated when and where there were opportunities to test, iterate and gain the appropriate levels of approval before any code is shipped.