Whitewater Project
A platform focused on improving product team efficiency by prioritizing people, practices, and tooling.
The opportunity
Imagine your company has thousands of product teams worldwide, and each of them use their own toolchains and code version control systems.
Do you see the problem?
At scale, consider the countless missed opportunities at cross-collaboration, reusability, and knowledge sharing, just because teams didn’t have a solid, unified set of tools and practices.
This is what we set out to solve. With this in mind, our team worked endlessly to ask and answer the following questions:
- ☐How might we enable teams to improve their workflows?
- ☐What can we do to help business units communicate and collaborate better?
- ☐How can we ignite a culture of sharing, reusability, and best practices, that would benefit the company as a whole?
Having different tools and workflows for each team created silos and hindered company-wide collaboration.
Roles & contributions
This was the first real product team I joined. My role as a Front-end developer was to build the UI and contribute to our team design system, support best practices learning sessions, and capture user needs in our backlog.
However, since I was fresh out of Design Camp, I loved taking assignments that allowed me to make significant contributions to a variety of design thinking activities, especially with user interviews and testing.
Contributions
- Front end development
- User testing
- Hills workshop
- Rapid prototyping
- Sponsor user interviews
- Story writing
Solution
The Whitewater platform started as a web application that served as a one stop shop for tools and practices. In the end, the project turned into a full ecosystem centered around tool adoption and empowering workflows.
- ☑Teams were able to access and modernize toolchains through simplified licensing workstreams
- ☑We delivered a field-guide catalog around best practices
- ☑Provided workshops to teams around the world to boost collaboration
The Whitewater Platform gave teams access to modernized tools with best practices.
A preview of the Whitewater tools catalog.
Impact
- +Improved communication and productivity by onboarding teams onto Slack Enterprise Grid
- +Engineering teams across the org migrated onto GitHub Enterprise, creating a culture of inner-source
Influencing Slack Enterprise
Check out this Medium story written by our Executive sponsor, Bill Higgins, who tells the story of Whitewater’s strong partnership with Slack.
I’m here to help
My inbox is open for anyone looking to explore potential collaborations. Whether you’re interested in discussing design or development, have speaking or writing opportunities, or are looking for mentorship, feel free to message me.