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Sprints at T R I M

You’ve probably heard of Google Ventures Design Sprints. We’re big fans of them here at T R I M, and we run them often, but most of the time when we say “sprint” at T R I M, we’re referring to our timeboxed work week. Every week our team of consultants is on sprint from Monday through Thursday. We have a brief stand up meeting every morning where we take turns sharing what we worked on yesterday, what we’re working on today, and whether or not we have any blockers. A blocker can be classified as anything that is preventing us from getting our work done. Maybe a designer needs buy in from Product Owner on a UX decision, maybe a developer needs an asset from design, these are just a couple examples of blockers. After stand ups on Monday and Tuesday, we roll up our sleeves and get to work but on Wednesday and Thursday we have extracurriculars after stand ups.

On Wednesdays we have Inspo Day and on Thursdays we have Training. Inspo Day is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a time for team members to share inspiring things they’ve discovered in the tech space throughout the week. On Training days, a team member puts together a short training presentation to educate the rest of the team. These presentations are brief and high-level but they are a great way for our different departments to get acquainted with the others’ skillsets. Developers sit in on product design trainings and vice versa. The rest of the week, the team is devoted to production.

We wrap up our sprints by end of day Thursday. Fridays are dedicated to demoing our work for Product Owners, sprint planning for the following week, investment time, and retrospective. Investment time is when we sharpen our skillset to ensure that we’re always at the top of our game. We build this time into the work week for our consultants to learn new things and tinker. Retrospective happens at the end of the day on Friday and it’s a time for us to celebrate what we did well that week and talk about what could have gone better. We create action items for the weeks ahead based on what we learned from what could have gone better.

With all that said, we expect each of our consultants’ output to be no less than 20 billable hours of high quality work each week. We do not bill for extracurriculars, daily meeting time, our Friday demo and planning time, nor do we bill for our weekly retrospective. Our sprint schedule has been instrumental for us in shipping many successful products over the years.

So there’s a bit about what “sprints” are at T R I M and what they look like each week. If you’d like to work together and experience our sprint process first hand, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line here and we’ll get the ball rolling. Let’s build something great together!

PBS KidVision 2.0 is here!

The latest and greatest version of PBS KidVision is now available for download in the Apple App Store! We’ve added a whole bunch of new features that we think our users will love. Here’s a look at what you can expect to find.

First off, PBS has made all educational content free for the time being since so many kids are stuck at home due to coronavirus. Also, KidVision can now be played on iPads as well!

The game has also been expanded dramatically. Version one had 3 locations: the art museum, the baseball stadium, and the zoo. Well the number of locations has been doubled in version 2! There are 3 more brand new locations now: the police station, the venetian pools, and the sea turtle rescue. Just like the original locations, these new ones have immersive 360 video experiences with 3 levels of play per location.

Another exciting new feature set is the ability to further customize and decorate your Pudgy avatar! In the first version, users could pick a custom Pudgy color, which was lots of fun. Now, users can use tickets to purchase cool accessories for pudgy like hats, sunglasses, lunchboxes, and more!

The customization doesn’t stop there, for the 3 original locations, users can now purchase location upgrades with tickets. Get more animals for the zoo, decorate the museum with a colorful mural, or add baseball players to stadium! You’ll also notice a few fun new animations throughout the app as well.

Download KidVision in the App Store today and let us know what you think! Be sure to stay tuned, we’ve got big plans for the next version too!