How We Made Tech Atlas With… Tech Atlas

Alex Kurkin

Alex enjoys building, mentoring, growing teams and then lead them into deep water to tackle challenging problems 🚀 He is keen to experiment with ways of working and innovative technical approaches. It is important for Alex to be committed to highest standard in every initiative he is involved in 🧨

Hey folks, some time ago we released Tech Atlas, an interactive coaching tool to help you solve complex challenges in managing your software development processes and teams (the one you're reading the story on right now!). In this story, I want to show how powerful it is by explaining how we used Tech Atlas to build Tech Atlas.

We executed step by step on the New Product Development Playbook. To make future Tech Atlas updates smooth, we also used some practices from the Teams on Autopilot playbook.

Technically, Tech Atlas is a straightforward product in implementation, so a flat-structured remote team of a developer, a designer, and a product manager with the QA expertise was enough for us to move fast.

Our product vision was to provide engineering leaders with a holistic approach to the best practices, so we decided to build Tech Atlas as an interactive knowledge base. But instead of making yet another Wiki-resource on the web, we introduced goals, playbooks, and discovery maps to organize content for easy navigation and guidance. You can check full Tech Atlas product vision and press release

The technical approach for Tech Atlas was defined merely by common sense arguments: for instance, since the data in the atlas is static, we can keep it in Markdown files rather than a database.

After we got the estimates for work during the Inception stage, we included backlog grooming practice in our weekly routine to keep our priorities and estimates up to date. And daily standups helped the team communicate and collaborate effectively.

To mitigate possible risks, we were advancing in small iterations and corrected the backlog items if we had new questions and answers.

Of course, no playbook can have all answers to the arising questions. It is more of a guideline, a general course to help you achieve your goals. With Tech Atlas, for instance, we needed to solve context-based problems as well, such as figuring out if our SDLC process is good enough or how to give the perfect product demo.

In the end, building an informational website can't be a sophisticated project. That's why applying Tech Atlas was simplified in this particular case. In real projects, everything is much more complicated.

But this is exactly why Tech Atlas isn't just a bunch of articles, but a full-fledged expanding interactive coaching tool for entrepreneurs and engineering leaders.