Proposal - OFN Product Overview

[lin_d_hop]

Hi everyone,

I would like to share with y’all a proposal for the OFN Product Overview - from henceforth called the Product Map.

What is a Product Map?

Great Question! Probably it is the kind of term used in different places to mean different things. Here we mean it as a high level overview of the product. It doesn’t have all the details, but it shows at a high level what the OFN tool does.

Why have a Product Map?

OFN is a complex product. It’s complex for users. Its complex for support teams. It’s complex for devs, testers, designers, product teams. Yeah, complex.

Having a basic high level overview of the product will help us in a bunch of ways:

• For new comers to the project we can send them the Product Map to help them get their bearings in understanding what OFN is and what it does
• For support teams, it can help us to tag and group support requests so we can start to use this as a metric in deciding what to work on next. We’re not scalable if our support teams become overloaded.
• From a technical perspective it might help us understand the unpacking of the monolith
• From a product perspective it can help us to view the product as a whole and prioritise

Convinced? Great!

You can find the draft product map here. And also in this wee image:

Note that across each area of the Product Map we have four key areas of focus:

Next Steps

1. It would be great to hear from all the support folks, instance mangers, devs, testers, designers, product folks… just the whole community as to whether this map matches your ideas about the OFN Product as it stands today. Please do suggest anything that doesn’t feel or look right, anything missing, anything superfluous.
2. Once we’re all in agreement for our v1 (we ain’t etching this in stone. It can be changed as we learn) then we can make a prettier version if we fancy
3. We can then think about the best way to translate this into Support tags and Github tags. We can think about how we can start to collect data and use this as a tool in our understanding, analytics and prioritisation processes.

A freaking lot of people need to be tagged in this

Support: @lbwright22 @chez @EmilyRogers @JessC @Jen
Instance Managers: @tschumilas @NickWeir @Kirsten @MyriamBoure @lauriewayne1
Delivery: @luisramos0 @maikel @Matt-Yorkley @apb @sauloperez @filipefurtado @Rachel @Erioldoesdesign @Jana

… please tag others in your circles!

[luisramos0]

Awesome work, I think this is very important!

On the Shopper side I am missing Content/CMS, I’d put it together with discovery maybe?
In some other ecommerce solutions I have seen Checkout separated from Shopfront as a separate section and put together with payment methods. These two things together are big and closely related

[lin_d_hop]

I like this suggestion @luisramos0. Also I think issues like this one point out that checkout can and should be a separate product area

[tschumilas]

just fyi and wondering on timeline for this. OFN-CAN would like to consider our recent covid experience with farmers markets and contribute to this draft vision. We are just in the middle of finalizing another funding proposal and want that out the door first. Is a 2 week timeline for our input possible? If not we will adjust priorities here - but just checking.

[lin_d_hop]

Hi @tschumilas
This is a live process and will be itereating as we go. I think we’ll find the map with adapt a little when we start to map issues to it. It will shift when we add new features. Don’t think that now is the only chance to comment. It is just the first chance to comment.

If you are happy for us to continue working before you take a look then great

[tschumilas]

This is amazing work - so helpful just to have this in one place.
One area that keeps arising in Canada is shoppers looking to buy from multiple separate shops more easily. I’m not at a point of suggesting solutions - I’m just passing on the need. We get asked this often. Producers are partially responding to consumers be setting up shared drop spots (like informal neighbourhood farmers markets). But customers would like more streamlined shopping across the group. I don’t see this direction generally in the product vision. I think the product vision tends to reflect the formal economy (producers, hubs). But post-covid here, we are seeing a strong demand and interest in food distribution in a more informal economy - where there is no ‘hub’ type business. If there is a way to discuss this as part of the product vision discussions, we’d be very appreciative. (it impacts shopping carts, it impacts our ‘groups’ feature, it impacts how we see drop spots…)

[lin_d_hop]

Thanks @tschumilas

The product map was created to map things that exist (even if they exist badly eg vouchers & pay with credits). It is not a place to talk about new features.

As dropshipping is a wishlist item it would be interesting to create a wishlist for it for discussions.

[lin_d_hop]

v1.2 Including Checkout as a separate part of the Shopper Experience.

[JessC]

Awesome, thanks for circulating this!
Within shopping experience -> discovery, what about something simple like navigating between the shops, producers and groups pages? Not sure if I’m understanding the structure of this map correctly but just thinking about when a shopper is discovering on OFN - they may browse through the shop/producer/group pages looking for specific products or just to window shop. (Example, I may get a query in support about navigating the groups page, where would I tag/file that inquiry to in this map?)

[lin_d_hop]

Here is Product Map v1.3 with @JessC’s very useful note included