How old are you?
Reviving a feature through diplomacy
Product Background
Vector is a personality driven, voice controlled, roaming desktop robot with SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) capabilities.
Challenge
Since the team was in relatively uncharted territory with a voice controlled robot, ideas for new features came from every discipline on the team.
Engineering
An engineer had an idea for a “joke” feature where vector would respond to “How old are you?” with the number of days old followed by a number of decimal places. “I’m 4.2424 months old” is an example. He thought this was a quick win for a feature.
vs
Creative
The team responsible for maintaining the personality of the robot across features said this would break the character. Character was just as important as engineering for Vector.
The feature was dead.
Approach
This is where me having a good relationship and common interactions with people in a variety of disciplines became vital.
I decided to do a little work to see if there was a compromise.
Result
In separate conversations, I talked to each of them to see what were the concerns and I convinced them to give me a chance to write up the feature in a way that would satisfy both disciplines. I wrote up the PRD (Product Requirement Doc, the basis for all features). I was able to capture some of the “he likes to calculate/numbers” spirit while still being
“character forward”.