So my name is gray as your head I've now been with moody for just over eight months and it's been a journey of learning eternal learning today I'm possibly not going to talk about as much detail as Martin was hoping that I would but I want to talk about the process and specifically about how we can get you guys involved in the process I'm just gonna quickly have learn a little bit about you guys talk a bit about myself a bit about the different themes talk about roadmap processes what I see as challenges in regards to road mapping in the traditional sense some of our key initiatives and then back to how you can get involved with it first of all I just wanted to remind ourselves why we're all here we're all there about empowering educators to improve our world what is it now about ten months ago when I was contacted by Moodle I couldn't believe my luck that I actually found somebody a company in Perth that did exactly what I had identified as my purpose enough which is to bring quality education to everybody globally so we'll go more into that detail so I just wanted to get a show of hands of the type of of who we've got in the room I know Martin did it earlier today as well but can I see how many developers we have here all right so if you sprinkle through I think you're all upstairs before we're educators and and and what about educators in the sort of corporate learning management systems or that's kind of a few there as well what have I missed not designers do we have any designers oh cool instructional designers as well cool this is good I need all your people to get involved in our roadmap process right whatever missed what what sort of other other other rules have you got around here what'd I miss IT people oh yeah there's a few of us around and and and sort of Moodle administrators yeah got a few around here so press the wrong button I really want to explore how we can extend the way we are working together now the way that Martin has set this awesome organisation up to involve and engage the community to be involved in the processes throughout not just from a developer perspective but from educators and from design and testing things that photo is from where I come from so I was born about ten hundred kilometers south of of the architecture cool in Norway my teachers are my teachers my parents are teachers my grandparents are teachers for whatever reason I decided not to become a teacher so I studied computer science instead interesting interesting subject for an extreme extrovert in case you hadn't noticed anyway I started my career I actually studied for what I do put my teeth in we moved around a lot in no because my parents always got jobs as teachers running in a new country new place every couple of years that's a bit odd to see yourself down there so we moved around a lot when I when I was young when I was about eight we moved down south to the the tropics of Norway you know we call it that in the north where the weather is always nice at least I remember the weather is nice it's nice in winter as well when it's snowing right at 13 my parents rigorous up when I was couple of years where my teachers my parents were teachers god they must be my teachers my life teachers or something so that was a fantastic experience to go to a local school there see how schooling was done this is a long time before digital but you know you learn along the way it she feet were born and I ended up studying in the UK and then back to Norway but I just wanted to talk a little bit about that journey because in that journey what I've learnt is that with everything we do in life education is at the core of it and I think that it's really important you know I've worked I started my my work career in Norway working for the big nasty corporate software companies like the Oracles and control data of this world and then I moved into smaller companies that were global which is kind of my sweet spot where it's a hundred to two hundred people that we work globally and we can work with people across the globe actually get the opportunity to move to Australia because of Oracle so you know I'm not bugging them too much with that so I landed in Sydney I'd never been to Australia before actually thought I'd come out for a couple of years fell in love with the climate you know this is the real tropics compared to the Norwegian tropics and then in about 2004 I contacted a friend in there in Perth from Sydney to say you know where can I buy an investment property and it goes oh maybe you want to move over here and that's when I'm at the mining industry so mining software industry that's all there is in Perth well I thought until just about a year ago but in the last five years or so I've had my own digital health startup and at the same time contracted in digital health delivering primary care services to remote in rural Australia so I do understand how important education is as part of delivering health and quality of life to people specifically in in cultures that are not as connected as we are centrally so I am inspired to deliver quality education to every adult and child in the world but I also think that it needs to be powered by people and technology together so bringing that real connection between people and technology I know that Rouen already said this but I see my role as to empower and enable and inspired my colleagues to work together and to work with the community to deliver Moodle products that address real world problems and so that we can actually create a sustainable business and reach more people shouldn't be looking at that one should I so one of the things I've learned about middle today is that we have a bunch of really awesome people inspired and inspiring people we have a product with a large and dedicated community that just want to help the world to inspire the world to improve and then will continuously experimenting with our processes and involving people in that process I'll come back to that one so a little bit about the teams unfortunately I hadn't joined that this time I think it was just before I am before I joined I'll go through just the product teams for now all the have pressed so most of you guys are probably most familiar with Moodle core or the LMS the core LMS which is led by Sandra Wang ma in Perth we have team members in person in Spain in the Czech Republic and Belgium and Netherlands and us or Sandra's updated my slide I can say we've got a team of numbers but this is the core system that's underpinning all our teaching and learning in teaching and learning platform then we've got the Moodle workplace product I don't know a few of you guys were obsessed it's really about the organisation and learning learning and development and it's based on the core LMS with plugins and it's streamlined or our fine-tuned for organisation and learning and development we have a team primarily based in Spain but we've got team members in the UK and Brazil as well so you can see we're a truly global organization eight people in that team I think it's it's not like say it's seven counting again we also have an app steam a tiny little absum that look after the apps both for both for the x4 Moodle LMS and for workplace and we have in that so if anybody is looking to have a their own presence in the App Store and thinks we have a branded app so you can either run the standard app or a branded up over the top of it you can see I've borrowed Martin's pretty pictures from this morning a middle out product if you haven't had an opportunity to meet Lee he's our new product manager in formerly cloud so he's here at the very it's been with us for I think it says fourth week now so it's a one of the lucky ones that get to meet you all now in his first month then we've got moodle net now his who here knows about moodle net well that's not so many so it's expected all of you to say yes so middle that is a social platform that enables educators to share curate and discuss educational resources it's currently in beta it we've validated some of the assumptions around it and and we're launching it in at the global mood in both Barcelona but Ilona it's a very tiny little team and it's run quite differently to how we run Moodle LMS you know we've got with the LMS we've got so many customers and users across the world that we the ones that we know about is a hundred thousand sites and ones that have voluntarily registered for the product it's one tiny little team no no customers no users yet well apart from the ones that are on on the test systems so we could run this process very different it's very experimental it's very lean in the process there middle education you must have all met the lovely salons here today tiny little team mostly in in North America I should say but we do have a few virtual team members across the organization basically that is our competence-based research informed education program how many of you guys were in the in the session yesterday here quite a few yeah did you enjoy it you learn something the facilitators are yeah great job by the facilitators and so lunch we also have a UX team and I'm gonna talk briefly about that as you can see I'm the acting lead for that so typically we would have empowered multi-discipline teams that would work together so you'd have designers and developers working together we've chosen to have a an affinity or an alignment between all the UX people across across the the organization so ash Barbara and Hina are all based in Perth so they primarily work with the core and LMS system and the Moodle sloughed system we've got Raphael that's that's our UX UI designer developer for workplace he's quite he has a lot of experiences worked with Emilio who is our product manager in partners and delivering workplace solutions in the past and Yvonne is our moodle net front and developer and UX designer so but for each project that we work on in moodle corentin our will assign a UX developer so they have plenty to do you should see ash and Barbara and sorry ash and Hina have been around here for those time and tomorrow if you're interested in in a user experience and how we do that we've got a session tomorrow called the user in the Moodle right I'm going to talk about roadmap processes so we always think of roadmaps as a straight forward right that's a road map it's all very linear linear because all roads are very linear if any of you have ever been to the north of nowhere you know that roads aren't necessarily linear they go like that around the fjords and around the mountains but and I don't even know what's around the corner there the typical road map is based on output so it's typically a list of prioritized features that we want to develop typically done in a regular basis on quarterly basis I'm not saying these things are bad I'm just saying that they don't always work and they come down from management so what happens is that they're very linear the somebody comes up with an idea then the management decides that it's got to happen then the UX team work on it and then they come up with the designs and and they do the testing of the designs and in the chocolate over the fence to the developers and developers go what and we've got some really awesome developers both in the community and within Moodle HQ all together but it's kind of that linear thing and then it comes to the end and we're just about to release and it goes to the QA cycle to the QA team and then they're going whoo and documentation oh I've got to make this work now sort of thing so it can be a bit challenging at times and it's also you know it can lack buy-in and it's not very empowering for the team so what we're trying to do is actually change that around and get involvement much earlier from the developers as and the designers and working together across teams with our customers and with our community as well because sometimes we actually forget that not all our product ideas work because you can have a brilliant idea I reckon if I do this fantastic feature and that could come from anywhere it could come from a teacher it could come from an administrator it could come from a developer it could come from a product manager heavens forbid a product manager who hasn't done their research right but they don't always work and there's only a small percentage so you need to test and validate test and validate that's why it's been really interesting to watch what we do with Moodle net at the moment with I have a timer here and it's off so it's been interesting to watch what what middle net are doing within a much more sort of iterate much faster iterations in the development because they don't actually have to look after all the customers that are there already we we need to validate the customer value and make sure that customers are and then even when you've got a really damn good idea like for example group messaging I think it's a great idea group messaging that we came up with in three point six I believe but it still takes multiple iterations to get it right right now there are there's a reason that we do have roadmaps we didn't we need to make sure that we're working on what's the highest value to be first and we also need to have some sort of a time-based view of it and this is why most roadmaps are reviewed on a quarterly basis which is something that we will continue to do we obviously need to address all of these issues now we all know that rules aren't necessarily straight right you don't have to go to Norway to find curvy roads and what I've found at Moodle is that I kind of inherited a a product foot portfolio of six very different products right all the things all the way from a core open source massive I don't want to say old can I say wise about a system I usually use wise instead of old but you know a system that has grown over years and has had a lot of contributions so we got that as the core elements then we've got the refined version of it that's specialized for workplace then we got moodle net let's brand-new and then we've got educational content and curriculum and I'm going woo what hit me here I was I was always developing a system that was there to break down the silos in there in the child care a child health space nothing oh I thought that was hard this one's more complicated but we are addressing the same kind of needs so I think one of the aspects that we've always worked with is actually outcomes based Road meso roadmaps that are focused on they you know the object objectives and key results and focus on business objectives or business objectives product vision that drives the roadmaps and in a way that it ensures that all the product ideas are aligned with our business objectives so that we can empower the product teams and it's really really important to empower the product teams the product teams that consists of the developers the designers the product managers and the users per se I usually say that I tried to get the right mix so the right people the right product and the right product I had up earlier I wrote that before I wrote this one sort of magically so we do have inspiring and and inspired people in the organization and in the community and I think we can make that product absolutely right for a number of different different needs if you like so that if we slice and package our product up for luck we've done now with workplace we could do that for higher education we could do that for k-12 we can work with our partners to make sure that it's easier for them to roll out and create the value add services for our customers to create valid value for their learner's and basically get get education out to as many people as possible and then as I said we are continuing to experiment with our processes I just wanted to reuse my slide that I made earlier so there are some key drivers to what I want to do here because one of the things that we tend to forget and I've I have worked you know I hate to say this but I have worked in the software industry for over thirty years no matter how good our intentions are because all are in our entities are usually good we want to solve problems but then we jump straight to solutions I've got let's do it this way and so we forget to look at the risks first and you have to get the risks upfront specifically when you're doing product development that's not just for a single customer and then we need to remember that defining and designing products is a collaborative process it's not that linear process it's not something that somebody can't control you know so where's Martin they are you have come up with some awesome ideas through the years and we and managed to deliver them but I do still think that it's been a collaborative process between you and the community and that develops always so what I'm trying to do is like tap into that use that and have a little bit more intentionality as you'll see it towards then and then I want to talk about solving problems right than just developing features in because we tend to chase features and we tend to chase features and we've been doing that a lot and Martin touched on it briefly this morning that we might not go for so many new features we'll probably look we're looking at let's get things right for the things that we're doing let's make it really really really good but still do some new features because you see you always have to keep on innovating and coming up with new things and working with the community and partners and plug-in developers and integration partners so there's four types of risks that I've that I typically look at the first one is really about the customer value if you develop something that the customer doesn't need you're kind of dead in the water right so what we have to do to to ensure that the customer would buy it was to choose to use it and then we have a massive focus on user experience I know it's been a critique sometimes of products like Moodle I'm not saying middle particularly but products that are that configurable because which is awesome because you can make it do whatever you like but it's kind of hard to design it for for fantastic user experience and then of course that's that love that big thing can we actually build it is it technically feasible to build this product let's get the developers in the process very early in the in in the process and then obviously does it and does it work for our business is this something that we need to do is it aligned with our with our visions and vision and and business objectives so customer value what does that really mean you know we can I've seen so many beautiful products developed through the times but it doesn't actually solve a problem for a customer right it looks great they go oh that's really nice that's really what I need and then you get to the end and they didn't actually need it anyway so you can't there's no uptake for it so it's really about understanding who we're developing for what problem we're solving for for them and why we need to solve those problems not just about developing cold products usability how do they use it how can we you know keep on doing use user testing user research first found out about the the problem test our prototypes test do user interviews do usability testing at the end but you need really need to make sure that they can use it you guys can talk to I keep looking over at our developers but there's a plenty of other developers here but it's you know it's hard to develop stuff if you don't know who it's for as well so I think that understanding what they who the customer persona is the use of personas who's going to be using it what their skillsets are it's really important and then whether it's actually technically possible to do it and then obviously the business viability is it in line with our business objectives come back to that so I wanted to put our product or process at a glance so the first thing we do is we collect ideas we've done this for years we keep collecting ideas we've got so many ideas they're coming out of areas sometimes but we've got so many ideas from you guys from the community in general from the forums from tracker we'll go a bit through that then we need to validate those ideas and that's kind of where we get into the okay who's it for and things their way prioritize idea as we look at that typically internally but we take input from from our community on that we want to get you guys even more engaged in that process and finally deliver product so I think to date although we've kind of done all these things we've not done it intentionally so what we want to do is over the next next few weeks I'll be posting out what the what the process is where we need you guys to get in where we would like to invite you guys to get involved with our process and give us input and help us prioritize and and and we'll keep that up to date so it's more about the process than actually promising we're going to have this particular feature ready at this time you know because we might find and this is I I come from a startup world as well so it's kind of that Lean Startup thing and go okay well hang on that didn't work so that wasn't the right choice then so that that's also an okay choice you know you spend two weeks on something or two months on something and then you realize hang on this isn't actually working it's okay to make that decision that it's not the right thing to do so you guys be all familiar with that but we do we're doing a lot more market research competitive analysis we get input from our partners anybody at Moodle us an idea whether it's a developer a designer or Martin or me or too large or Fiona at the back here so so anybody can come up with ideas we look at the priorities that the partners give us they have an opportunity to do that in the system we look at analysis of RFI's you know so attenders and things for from from from a higher education for example there's a you know and there's a few players out there that that that are are selling in a different way to what we've done because moodle is so configurable and you can use it for anything and others are kind of going in and and knocking on our doors over on the doors of our customers i'm sure i've heard from a few people here over the last couple of days and i've got many people from the who are members of moodle user association here one two three four oh good good to see because by being a member of the Moodle user association you actually have the opportunity to vote in a different way and vote on projects and be part of that process so that's kind of one way of being involved as well and finally and with Martin's doing directly after this the Moodle moot brainstorm wish lists of brain some sessions which I can't wait to participate in and and see see how they run when it comes to validating that yes I've already gone through this in some we start with the why so why would the customer use and why should we do it but I think the core thing that we need to look at is really who is our customer who is the user can we actually understand what job they're doing and by that I don't mean being on the screen on their keyboard I should say no tapping on their screen although some people might do it's not how they use the product in itself it's actually what problem they're trying to solve are they trying to engage their students you know are they trying to use to talk to somebody that's in a remote and rural area that doesn't have access to the internet all the time so it's about getting that narrative up and understanding what that is and then so that should then inform our ideas with the prioritization we need to be driven by product vision I have written up the product list now I'm going to publish all these things over the next couple of weeks the product vision for all the different products how they're all linked together and things linking things with the business objectives and then we have a combined criteria that we've set up which is about business sustainability how it's alliance with our business goals and objectives what the demand is what the effort is and what the risk is so that's actually something that we do internally amongst the management team at at Moodle and then we'll publish that out to the wider community once we've gone through that process we're not quite there yet we're having quite landed on I haven't quite landed the process and got it out to you guys yet so that's that's my number one one task I've now got the whole right team working on their individual things and they starting to converge as well so I like the space were in ah it's been a bit of a scramble because I had them when I came on board there was three products that were launching in the first three months of 2019 so they were I wasn't doing it myself but I was kind of trying to understand all the products and support the teams in getting this products out we done it we're getting better and better and then in then I'll keep talking empower teams but I just think it's so important they understand the risks they understand what the customer values they are driven by the product vision and their business objectives but working together and bringing in the brick bigger teams from the community okay so this is as close as you'll get to a road map now we're going to talk about some key projects and product timelines there we go we have some themes that we're working or initiatives that we working across the products guess what engage community the other one is where's my UX designers there there's one last one so oh they are I couldn't see you behind all these people thank you so I call it delighting our users we want to delight re our educators we want to delight our course creator so that they create engaging learning experiences for their learners we want to deliver customer value so basically understanding the customer problem we're working on learning analytics across the board what do we need to capture and what do we need to what are the metrics we need to capture in the system accessibility as I'm I spelled that right yeah accessibility is something that's coming around that that's going to be regulated and and and and compliance tested and then some of the key things that are saying the integration and interoperability between our own products but also with other products so some of the integration partners that we're rolling in with the product and making hopefully creating better value both for the part for the other partners and for our customers but also integrating our own product so basically Moodle net into into Moodle core using Moodle LMS or a core for for our MSE and using MSE to sell so I don't mean sell us in sell for money necessarily but like set up the system and educate people in the use of the product and finally that the thing that's now coming together for me is that all our products are starting to converge again so so that's a that helps me it's so important to everybody else but I can see you know both the LMS and and workplace and Moodle sound and net so they're coming together all right so I'm gonna quickly go through the product vision for for each one of the products so to be the number one open-source teaching and learning platform I think we are globally so no surprises there I hope so this I just set up this this is kind of like the closest we get right now because we want some more input on where we're going over the next few few years so we have delivered three point six and three point seven already some of the so that the forum project is kind of one of the big projects that we've been working on so that started out with the Ryoka tech thing we're working with the moodle user association on that so as you can see there for our three point eight delivery we are specifically working on the advanced forums so building on the hour we are collecting some that we did for three point seven we have focused on h 5p anybody here want h 5p i thought so important stuff so so the team has has done an initial assessment they started working on it they're working with the with with the plugin that's there but also looking at how we integrate it even more martin is heavily involved with that because this is one of his passion projects martin gets to decide one project for release right most of them then i try to let the team decide the rest but learning analytics is another care that we're kind of looking at more and more to evolve and work with you guys so one of the things we're looking at it's kind of like a smart pot or a student assistant to come in don't know if we're landing it in 3.8 because we've just decided in the last couple of weeks that we're just going to focus on a couple of key projects and then we are looking at you can see at the bottom that the continuous improvement activity to say anybody love the activity chooser in its current form anybody not love the activity chooser in their current form so so that's the and we've done some work some initials work on that and some initial designs that we'll be testing out for that relative dates so relative to when the course started and relative to when the student started we're trying to look at this ones may not all land in or something 70 or days but we are doing the planning for the next releases so what we're trying to do here is a process of continuous continuous discovery and deliveries away while we're working on the others were still we're planning out the next ones for the next releases all right on to workplace so I always do them in this order it might not make sense to everybody else it does to me it's really to be the number one platform for organizational learning and development but building on Moodle LMS platform with work workplace specific features and benefits so what we did this year was we had the MVP announcement and we've just done the production ready versions that version does with our key partners that the partners that have been involved in the development you all know that it's what Moodle workplace is a collaborative project between will HQ and partners who wanted to be involved with it they've gone through they've assessed what which and a lot of these partners have extensive experience in organization learning and development or corporate learning and so we've taken the the brains trust and worked with them I'm not saying that others couldn't have been involved in that but we've worked with them very closely to get that key the core set of functionality that was required for for workplace learning and so our first three points and so you can see we have the same versioning as for the LMS because there are dependencies there has those key features and it's an entry level product but it's really nice and smooth and and what you call it tidy a tidy user experience it's got a theme that specific for workplaces targeting workplace it's got the course formats of course templates that are useful for that so our next stage is really about delivering more migrate and migration tools more integration integration with the LMS and recertification which is linked to the others I have put as a placeholder on all of these ones now that we will be working with the community partners and customers to determine what the best priorities we've got a whole long long long wish list for all the products of of things we think we should be doing but we actually want to work with you guys to validate those ones does anybody here have a branded app for that so we've got a whole apps team in in Spain but does anybody have I know there is one customer here that has a branded app but I don't know if he's still around here so do you know what a branded app is yeah anybody not know what branded apps are okay well then I don't need to explain it all right what we do is we basically take the standard up which is there so that we can we can ensure that people who don't necessarily have access to networks at all times can access can download and access their their courses or we can bring learning to two regions and places where people don't don't have it wouldn't normally have access to it while they're not at school and then we can take the the branded APIs I version of that a little bit more advanced features but it also allows the institution or the organization to have their own branding on it and their own app in the App Store so that it's a I guess for larger institutional institutions it would be a sales tool if you like to get oversea students in for example but talk to Fiona if you guys are looking after want one of those things and our partners so it's aligned with LMS but we're looking at some improve the features for the branded app so we're doing a campaign at the moment to generate awareness and leads around it but we're also looking at identifying Pro future so we are working with some of our so for example for the the workplace app we'll be doing a manager view for higher education we're looking at doing a teacher view that will allow you to do the more grading and more setup and things while you're on the go as an educator and then we're doing some partner and enablement on that ok modal cloud we want to provide the most affordable robust and easy to use Moodle hosting for small to medium sized organizations so so at the moment we've got a few different packages that we're looking at creating more packages simplified onboarding did anybody find it super easy to sign up and set up their Moodle cloud site one person found it really easy to three oh that's good I'm happy but you guys are the experts so we are doing some work to simplify the user experience and and and and make the onboarding easier but the other thing as well we're doing some I guess purpose-built packages for different different customers but we'll be working with the partners because I'll encourage you guys to go and have a look at the moodle net resources that we've got online especially for the educators it's a it's it's a whole different kind of Moodle but it actually brings the moodle's of the world together so you can share share resources in a I was going to say in a fun way but in in a way that you haven't been able to do before because it's it's a federated system so it links in with your different moodle's there that's we're launching that in later this year it will be integrated Moodle so that you can so you can share and load resources into Moodle at the moment we're running some controlled pilots for that I had to be the preferred curriculum and accreditation program for the digital conferences for educational institutions and trading organizations worldwide we've been working with a bunch of partners o know if you've talked about focus groups while we're working with some focus groups to get input and feedback to the system there we are looking how we can work with you guys to reuse the the fabric if you like of this and cut new patterns in it maybe we can even tailor it for you ASSA how can you guys help we need to work with people to make sure that we verify the customer problems and needs so that we can understand the customer value and help our partners help you to get the right tools out there and and I guess engaged learners and provide quality education so that would be user interviews it might be testing it might be writing up with tests checking our requirements and that sort of stuff we have some designers head anyway I saw there was people that put up their hands if you're into UX design or UI design please reach out to us and we have only a tiny little team of designers so we can always do with more their UX and usability testing this is critical this is about seeing what features you know where as as we're developing them and coming up with new design so it's early access to prototypes giving input into the product product direction so that we can decide on that together functionality testing I don't know do any of you guys get involved in this Shuhei cycle for the LMS I'm happy to hear that some people get involved with that we can always do with more people run a process right at the end we'll be running much more of that throughout because we're getting more agile again so we'll be turning out functionality and asking people to get involved with testing but we will be reaching out to see if we can get get people's specifically involved with that and for the developers in the room we want you to work with us on the key projects on the on the on the roadmap priorities and and that can be our key projects but it can also be specific so we might go and say well we're going to work on database now for as an activity in now for the next two sprints or let I might not say now in two sprints we're going to work on database for example I'm not saying that that's going to be the one that we do but we might be working on that from a usability and from a development perspective and getting people in also it's it's it's about having some intent around the products that we're working on social proof so nobody buys anything nowadays unless they or unless they hear it from their friends they hear it from people that they trust so if you are having good experiences with Moodle please go out there and give us a review on kotero or other products or just give us some testimonials we are always looking for case studies and there's my favorite I want to work so one of the techniques that we can use to actually identify the customer needs is to you can write a press release in advance but I actually really like the customer reference letter so you start working you can invent your own customer a future customer reference letter or you can you can actually work directly with customers so I'd love to work with the partners in the room and with customers in the room who are looking to go to to use a new feature and then let's workout and write the requirements in forms in form of a thank or a reference letter in advance before we've done it because that gives us intent for our development intent for our design if you do want to get involved we've got a web page called on the.com called get involved asks a little bit about your role and what you do and then we will be contacting people about specific projects for that you're gonna start yes