Cloudfour.com Redesign: This is how we do it

By now you’ve probably heard that we’re full steam ahead with a redesign of our beloved cloudfour.com, and we’re doing it in the wide open for everyone to see.

This is an interesting and fun endeavor for us, being both the client and the project team. It definitely adds a layer of complexity, but it also allows us to try things out that we might not be able to given a client’s project constraints.

We pride ourselves on being adaptive to the project’s needs – we don’t have a one size fits all process. This is part of our DNA (and part of our differentiation as a company.) Here’s how we are adapting to fit our own project’s needs:

In our public Slack channel, I mentioned that we’re working in agile fashion (not capital-A-agile, but y’all know how I feel about that. We’ve settled into two week sprints as a general default on projects, and we started our first sprint last Tuesday. It goes through March 8.

To keep things fun and interesting, we opted to name sprints after animals. Sprint 1 is called Honeybee, mostly because I liked the emoji for that animal. Buzz!

We have weekly check-in meetings that take place during our regularly scheduled staff meeting. We already have that time blocked, and we rarely use it all, so no need to schedule yet another meeting.

For daily communication, we use Slack. We also have a Basecamp set up for this project, but we are using it less and less every day.

We’re still feeling out if a daily stand-up is necessary for this project and we’re exploring some tools to facilitate asynchronous stand-ups via Slack. More on that soon!

We’re using Trello to manage our backlog and keep track of what is in-progress and complete. We’ve made our board public, so you can follow along there as well.

We generally set up our Trello board so there is a Project Information list at the far left. This provides some basic context for the work that we are doing, and hopefully is a good place to get started when you first join the board.

For the moment, we have just a few lists to help us keep track of tasks. Please feel free to take a peek around!

I’m excited about the challenges we are undertaking on this project, and super thrilled we can discuss them in the open. Check in on our Slack channel, Trello board, and Pattern Library to stay up-to-date on our progress (GitHub repo coming soon!). We’re also tweeting at #c4redesign. You can catch up on all our redesign posts here on our site.