ONES X Blue City Brothers｜Organic R&D management improvement is the healthiest subversion

How does the social application manage the R&D project?

The Blue City Brothers started their personal website "Light Blue Memories" in 2000. It is one of the earliest and most influential diversified communities in China. In 2012, the founder of the website, Geng Le, made the website mobile and created Blued, a social software based on geographic location. At present, Blued has accumulated more than 54 million users and monthly active users (MAU) has reached 6 million, covering 210 countries and regions around the world.

In 2020, Blue City Brothers was listed on the Nasdaq in the United States and became the "first stock of the pink economy." According to its three-quarter report released at the end of November this year, its monthly active users of its mobile applications reached 7.5 million; the total paying users in the quarter increased by 57.1% year-on-year to 776,000, achieving six consecutive quarters of continuous growth.

So, what pain points did Bluetown Brothers encounter in the management of R&D projects? How did you overcome the difficulties? This issue of ONES "Industry Practice" takes you to understand the one-stop R&D project management of Bluetown Brothers.

Customer background

As a multicultural company focusing on social networking, Blue City Brothers has always been committed to finding the most suitable R&D management tools and services.

Geng Le, the founder of Bluetown Brothers, once said: "The core of building product power is to form its own flywheel effect, which is to provide a better user experience. Products must be subtracted and services must be added. In the final analysis, the achievement of all goals is still product power. , If there is no good product, no matter how good the team is, no matter how good the organizational structure is, it’s useless."

In other words, in terms of tool selection, Blue City Brothers pursues appropriate functions and high-quality services. Based on this recognition, the Blue City Brothers chose ONES.

With the completion of the acquisition of lesdo, Fanka and other companies by the Blue City Brothers and their listing in the United States, the business map has continued to expand, so the R&D team has gradually expanded. In this way, the multi-product line and multi-iteration R&D model has brought the company There is a big challenge.

After the ONES service team has a comprehensive understanding of the Blue City Brothers, the pain points of its R&D management are sorted out as follows:

• The tools are scattered and the R&D process is difficult to get through
• Many business lines make it difficult to control the progress of multiple projects
• The relationship between "management" and "efficiency" is difficult to balance

ONES R&D management solutions

In response to the needs and pain points of the Blue City Brothers, ONES provides a complete solution from the following aspects.

Standardized process, agile development

Before using ONES, the R&D team used a variety of tools. The internal communication of the team mainly relied on emails. The data and processes between tools and tools could not be connected, resulting in chaotic R&D processes and serious data fragmentation. In addition, in requirements management, the team needs to collect follow-up requirements, non-version requirements (ie, temporary project activities, requirements changes), and technical optimization requirements. The source of requirements is relatively complex, and existing tools cannot be effectively managed.

Taking the "Fan Ka" project as an example, ONES built a one-stop R&D project management solution for the Blue City Brothers, helping the Blue City Brothers realize the implementation of the plan and the promotion of internal tools. First, ONES helps to sort out the agile development process applicable to the company’s business. Secondly, in the general direction, it manages all the needs, technical optimization, R&D tasks and bugs of the “Fanka” project, and carries each one through iterations. Version of the working data. The whole project is divided into four stages: "demand stage", "development stage", "testing stage" and "gray stage". Each stage sets specific execution steps to standardize the R&D process.

"Fan Ka" project management steps

In terms of demand management, ONES has planned the "Create Demand Field Description" for the three major demand sources of Bluetown Brothers, and stipulated that when demand is created, the product manager will create the demand list, and the R&D supervisor will create the R&D task and associate the corresponding demand, which standardizes The standard for the submission of requirements to solve the problem from the source.

In addition, in order to help the Blue City Brothers get through the R&D management process, the ONES service team sorted out three sets of R&D flowcharts suitable for different needs according to different sources of demand, and carried out process configuration and field descriptions. Enable the R&D team to get started quickly and develop agilely.

Multi-project overview to quickly grasp the progress

Since Bluetown Brothers has multiple products and overseas projects, product development needs to cover multiple operating systems such as iOS and Android. The multi-product line and multi-iteration R&D model has become the norm. When parallel projects continue to increase, the progress management of multiple projects gradually It has become a headache for management.

ONES Plan provides them with a manager’s perspective and helps them realize the unified management of multiple projects. In specific implementation, by adding multiple parallel projects to the same project set, managers can understand the project leader, project cycle, and number of projects from a global perspective.

ONES Plan project set management

As the project continues to run, the progress of each project will also be automatically synchronized to the ONES Plan. Managers can intuitively control the progress of multiple projects through the Gantt chart; for projects that need to be focused on, they can also click to directly enter the specific project to view Item details.

ONES Plan Gantt Chart

Achieve a balance between management and efficiency

In the previous R&D project management, it often took a lot of time to configure the tool system. In addition, team members needed to update and transfer the status of work items manually, which wasted a lot of time. The Blue City brothers are eagerly seeking a "balance between management and efficiency."

In the process of serving the Blue City Brothers, ONES first clarified the complete project process for him, so that the entire R&D process runs on the same tool, team members do not have to shuttle between multiple tools, reducing the team’s cooperation costs , While improving the efficiency of team collaboration, it also breaks the problem of data fragmentation.

Secondly, when creating a new project, ONES supports copying from existing projects, which not only greatly reduces the configuration cost of the team administrator, but also maintains the same process standard for the new project and the old project, which standardizes the team’s workflow.

ONES Project New Project

In addition, in the update of work item status and task flow, ONES supports the configuration of work items. With the help of the update attribute function in the workflow setting "post-action", it can specify that the person in charge of the work item is automatically updated after the specified action is triggered. , Transfer the task to the designated person in charge.

"Post Action"-Update Attributes

For example, when the task is completed, the current task status can be directly updated, and the task will be automatically transferred to the person in charge of the next stage according to the workflow that has been set, and the person in charge field will be updated in the system to notify relevant personnel.

"Organic growth is the healthiest subversion, not to open another track to abandon all the previous things and start over." The founder of Blue City Brothers Geng Le Zeng said-this passage also provides the company's R & D management improvement A vivid footnote.

As the leading domestic R&D management solution provider, ONES also pursues organic growth. It took six years to polish a set of R&D management system that meets the needs of Chinese technology companies and serve a large number of leading customers in all walks of life.

Today, Blue City Brothers has achieved significant improvements in the R&D management process and project schedule management, and has achieved a balance between management and efficiency. I believe that the future Blue City Brothers will continue to serve customers and subtract products in the face of huge traffic entrances and product simplification. The ONES service team will continue to pay attention to the R&D management of Bluetown Brothers, quickly respond to customer needs, provide follow-up services for products, and continue to promote the innovation of multicultural communities.