Fourth client meeting reactions

We had our fourth client meeting last Friday with Nikan, as we are switching our client (Nikan <-> Ackley) every week. This time, there was a new way for us to face a meeting, because we had to plan the agenda of the meeting. All the points to discuss were up to us.

At the beginning, it may seemed as a benefit for the team, because you can actually divide the time (25 minutes) as you want, focusing on the parts you prefer to discuss or showing a demo to your client. You actually take the control over the meeting, and you are able to choose the points that you want to deal with. This way may be seen as an advantage, but sometimes it could be tricky especially if you do not distribute your time correctly, because you have to be able to control the meeting's flow by distributing the time. Hence, if you want to success, keep in mind that you need to plan the meeting in advance, and then, fit your meeting's agenda as you planned.

For this reason, we decided discussing about the schedule before Friday's meeting. As we had certain parts of the functionality already running, we decided focus the meeting on showing Nikan a model with the progress since we start working: user registration and sign in process, avatar upload, challenge selection page, current challenge progress bar (I have been working on it with Natalie for several weeks), new challenges creation, etc.

Although we wanted to spend most of the time available showing the demo, we began the meeting with a brief review over the tasks done the previous week. In the meantime, we have fulfilled the timeline and all the weekly tasks have completed by each team member. After that, we went through the Demigod demo. Note that in the last meeting we made a mistake when we tried to show a demo to Ackley, but fortunately we learned from our mistakes, and this time we brought a laptop with a Rails server running and the website ready to be displayed.

The demo was introduced by Matt, who clearly explained each functionality which was already working properly as well as showed several suggestions and tests suggested by Nikan. We felt that she was really satisfied with our work, and she actually congratulated us for our progress. Moreover, I think we made a great control of the time, because once we ended the demo we still had five minutes left to identified the tasks we need to accomplish due next meeting (after the Spring Break).

From my point of view, this was the most successful client meeting so far. We hope the next one be even better since we are working hard to have all the Demigod's functionality ready as soon as possible.