The Future Of The Bitcoin.com Wallet
By: Alfonso Rocha
Tags: Bitcoincash, Agile, Bitcoin, Product Management, Product Roadmap

By Alfonso Rocha, Senior Product Manager.

Big news: We’re launching a technical blog at Bitcoin.com!

Detail of a wallet, in the Bitcoin.com Wallet app

Our team wants to share our excitement about all the things that we are building right now.

We have in our hands the ability to change the life of billions of people and we want to share every step of the process. Our mission is simple and ambitious: to enable economic freedom for all individuals across the globe.

The future of the Bitcoin.com Wallet is something the team and I are really excited about. We have laid out an ambitious roadmap ahead of us, focused on the ability to use Bitcoin as cash and making sure that acquiring and spending Bitcoin is as easy as possible for everybody. “Everybody” means everybody.

We believe everyone should have access to Bitcoin. Independent of where they live, if they have any disability, how rich or poor they are, or what technologies they can access.

Roger, our CEO and founder, landed our mission as perfectly as I could have ever imagined in his H2–2018 message to the company. “Bitcoin.com aims to make trading with your fellow man an inalienable human right.” This message inspires us greatly, and it serves us with a guiding North Star when we’re thinking about where we want to take our products next.

In the Product team we believe that before having a great product, you need to have a great team. And any great team needs a clear and straightforward process. You need a good mix of processes and common sense if you aim to be a reliable group that can agree, define, build, test, and launch the future of the world's economy.

For my first post in this technical blog, I want to share some specifics on how we work on the Wallet team. We work in a SCRUM-like fashion, trying to minimize red tape, since the team’s size is still manageable through conventional communication channels.

The Sprint

The Wallet team works in 2-week sprints, as we believe this allows us enough time to lend quality to new features without getting overwhelmed. Quality has become our #1 mantra when working on the application. We handle extremely important assets, and we can’t settle for anything less than the best.

During these 2 weeks, 3 different things are in flux.

For the sake of this example, let’s say the current version of the Wallet app that you can download from the app stores is v4.10.

1. The development team is working on the v4.12. They are implementing, communicating, and testing every piece of software that they are adding to, changing, or removing from our codebase.

2. The QA/Support team is testing v4.11 thoroughly according to the defined acceptance criteria. Whenever we get their sign-off on the release candidate our development team has pushed, we’ll upload to the stores and release it to our users.

3. Design and tech definition is being set in place for v4.13, v4.14,or even v5.0. We make sure we have enough time to plan, define, and create documentation based on what our users need. In a future blog post, I will share how we learn, investigate, and decide what to build next.

We start the sprint with a ‘Sprint Kick-off’ meeting, where we talk about what has been assigned to the current sprint. When we finish and build our release candidate, we hold a standard ‘Retrospective’ meeting in which we talk about how we felt during the sprint, what we did well and should continue doing, what mistakes we made, and how we plan to avoid them in the future. These meetings can extend to up to 2 hours, and the Retrospective may even span 3 hours. Still,they are essential for the well-being of our teammates and, ultimately, our product. No matter how busy we are, we always find time to sit down for these two events.

I’ve skipped many aspects of how we work, touching on just the most basic aspects of every new Wallet version and without including every single team that helps us achieve this. But my colleagues and I will continue to use this blog to show you a bit of the life inside the Bitcoin.com development team.

What would you like to read about next? Tell us in the comments!

Pay for last night’s dinner with the Bitcoin.com Wallet app

Want to work on the Wallet or any other of our exciting products? We’re hiring! Check out the job openings here.

Alfonso Rocha is a Senior Product Manager in Bitcoin.com and is in charge of the Wallet app. He has been managing internet products for a decade, with a big focus on Mobile Apps since the times when Blackberry and J2ME reigned. Follow him on Twitter @elcoiki.

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