Behind The Scenes: Products Leadership Team Retreat
Last month our products leadership team gathered for their annual retreat. Supporting and maintaining The Events Calendar and our related suite of premium WordPress plugins is a tall order, so while the rest of us kept things running smoothly for the day-to-day, the partners behind Modern Tribe met with Zach, Neill, Matt, Geoff, and Rob to review our long-term vision and strategy.
Our products leadership retreat centered on a few core questions:
- Where do we want The Events Calendar to go in 2016?
- How can we improve our processes and our team?
- What’s the next big product we should tackle?
Over the 3 days of the retreat, the team really dug deep into each of these questions to see how we can add value to our users and the community at large.
Enhancements to Existing Products
Feature requests, theme integrations, and usability trends were thrown into the mix as we considered possible enhancements to our existing plugins. We compiled a massive list of 118 items for consideration and debated them extensively, prioritizing if and how we could move forward on each item based on estimated effort required, community interest, support impact, team enthusiasm, and more.
As a result of these deliberations, several new features have made the list for our 2016 release cycle. We can’t share what they are quite yet, but we promise good things are in store for The Events Calendar and our premium plugins.
Processes & Team
We wouldn’t be where we are today with the processes and team that support our company’s vision.
With the addition of Hunter and Geoff B. to our support team, we feel like we’re starting 2016 in a great place to handle the level of demand we seeing from our community. We’ve got some ambitious support initiatives we’re planning to tackle in Q1 and Q2 of this year, so having the right team in place is critical to our success.
On the development side, we’re proud of the team we have in place. Over the past year they’ve proved very effective at shipping major releases with predictability, and we know we can count on them to continue to ship top-quality code with regularity throughout the coming year. Specifically, we’re targeting four major releases that focus on features, starting with our 4.1 release planned for later this month. We’re also planning more frequent maintenance releases that deliver bug fixes to the community faster than in the past.
Internally, we’ve also added a new QA Engineer to the team. Ron is leading up our efforts to improve our automated QA processes and catch potential bugs earlier in the development cycle, giving us the ability to deliver a better user experience with each of our releases.
Our Next Big Thing
Although The Events Calendar remains the heart and soul of our plugin suite, we want to continue to push ourselves to deliver even more value to our users. That’s why we dedicated a significant chunk of time during our products leadership retreat to reviewing the research and analysis on four potential new ideas.
Later this year, we plan to dig further into one of these new ideas, and if all goes well, we may begin development work in Q4. Assuming things continue to run smoothly, we could be unveiling our next big thing as early as spring of 2017.
In Conclusion
The folks behind our products leadership retreat have a real commitment to the team and caring for everyone within as individuals. With their guidance, we’ll continue to stay the course towards operational excellence, innovation, and exceptional user support.
We have great things planned for 2016 and beyond!