Last weekend I attended Startup Weekend Detroit with a group of 5 other Atoms from Atomic.
On Friday night, Justin, Paul, Scott and I joined the Ghost in A Box team. Ghost in A Box is the brainchild of Melissa Price. The concept was simple, users buy a ghost online and receive a package containing their new resident. Once customers receive their ghost, they can go online and learn their ghost’s story.
The challenge in front of our team was to refine, define, design, build and deploy in 1 day. Luckily, we had a small head start. Melissa had a strong concept for her product and she had already created the visual style. Even with these components in place it was still a daunting task to create a soup to nuts product in one day.
The team arrived at the Madison building at 9am ready to get down to business.
9:36am -
We decided to start by mapping our product through a mini UX discovery session. The team started by creating a simple business ecosystem so that we all understood the business model and direction. Next, we defined the target users that our business ecosystem revealed. This naturally lead into simple story telling or context scenarios that described the interactions that we needed to create. Using this information, we quickly created a product backbone and then did some team sketching to create a strong shared understanding of what we wanted to build.
12:21pm -
In order to hit our aggressive development deadlines we needed to have seamless design/development integration. Our mini discovery session helped pave the way, but we still needed to build an application and integrate a bunch of designs quickly. We facilitated this integration by creating 2 GitHub repositories. One repository was for the application and the other was a temporary StaticMatic site that was a sandbox for Paul to cut the majority of the CSS and HTML. The rest of the team concentrated on shelling out the basic Rails application, spiking Pay Pal integration and experimenting with adding spooky sounds.
5:32pm -
As Paul completed various screens we worked on merging his work into the Rails application. At this point in the day the development environment had become stable and we deprecated the StaticMatic sandbox. The entire team was now working on various features, checking in frequently and communicating constantly. Lot’s of pragmatic pairing was taking place. The team was in a solid groove.
7:28pm -
Slows Bar B Q. Yum 
Thanks Melissa!
9:46pm -
Melissa had been working hard all day on copy and it was time to start integrating it into the site. Things were really starting to come together, but we were running out of time. It was time to make a hard product management decision. We decided to cut one of our R1 features in order to have enough time to polish, test and deploy the application.
11:46pm -
Team break for ping pong and beer.
12:32am -
Two more Atoms, Drew and Jason joined the team. They had been working all day with turnDetroit team, but since their team had retired for the night they decided to help us with the home stretch. Together our now 7 person team worked on adding application polish, fixing bugs and deploying to Heroku.
5:03am -
Success! The application is live and running smoothly. In just 20 hours our team refined, defined, designed, developed and deployed the first release of a new product.
On Sunday, Melissa pitched the product and our team won 2nd place out of 15.
