Last year we published a production schedule. Why did we decide to open that process up and show the community everything we were working on, and what was it like having to put that together and update it every week?
TL;DRThe schedule was published because they work alongside the community and want to share progress openly; last year's version was manual, and the new roadmap uses live data.
Well, the why is because we're working alongside the community. There's no question that the more we can get out, the more we can share, the more we can discuss and have feedback on, the more everybody can see kind of where we're going and how we're doing it, what we're getting done, because we're on this journey together for all intents and purposes. We are interwoven into one, so the more that we can work together, the better, right? So that was the intent, and the intent with the current roadmap is the same idea. The manual nature of it was definitely because of how we organized some of our schedules. It was still in JIRA and it was still in Microsoft Project, things we've talked about in previous production stuff, where we built that schedule, you got to see it. It was still happening in that vein. We just weren't capturing it in an automated way per se last year. So there was some manual nature to making sure we got the information from the right place to the next right place. And there were always intentions to do what we did this year. It's just we prioritize our overall developer work and our time. And so things shifted around, and so it stayed somewhat more manual than we probably all would have liked it to be. And then we shifted things around to be more burndown. As we got to 3.0, it made sense to talk even more granular about burndown and get that going. And Chris was really passionate, just like all of us: how do we keep sharing this, how do we keep this engagement, how do we make sure you know, here's where we're going, here's what we're trying to do, stay on this journey with us. And so that brought us, like all iterations, into this new roadmap that we have this year, working closely with Turbulent and our partners over there, really coming up with a solution that allowed for that immediate data, live data, right there, and has those checks and balances, and we can share that conversation. So yeah, it was just kind of the first pass of it. From my understanding, over three years here now, we hadn't, in my history, shared that level of detail. And Chris was really adamant about it, and we all got on the same page about it at the end of the year before and into the new year. And we really wanted to get that in front of everybody the best we could. Try to bring you along with our timelines and keep you up to date on things, and for good or for bad, keep our skeletons out there and keep showing you, this is what we're trying to do to make the best damn game we can.