Unidraw – Miro replacement – gets into our business
Ermek Umurzakov
As a QA engineer, I believe that in order to test programs effectively, it is important to understand the product we are testing. Each program is a complex algorithm with many branches and scenarios.
Typically, algorithms are described in documentation in the form of numbered lists or tables. Although such a structure can be useful for systematization, it is often insufficient to understand all the intricacies of the system. Formal records do not always reflect real dynamics and do not take into account unexpected scenarios that may arise during use. Moreover, such a format may miss details of the interactions between different elements of the system.
An example of a tabular presentation of documentation on the algorithm:
To fully comprehend and understand the algorithm embedded in the program, mental effort is required. Analyzing a complex logical structure and numerous branches can be tedious. In this case, Unidraw becomes an extremely useful tool for visualizing and decomposing the algorithm into more understandable parts.
Unidraw allows me to effectively structure information by creating visual diagrams and diagrams that make it easier to understand complex elements and their relationships. With it, I can visualize the algorithm, highlight critical paths, test different scenarios, and visually display the results, which makes the process of understanding and designing tests much easier.
Using the diagram made it possible to immediately notice several missed cases in the algorithm:
1. Lack of script processing when the phone number is not found.
2. Lack of conditions for situations where the status is not 1, 2 or 3.
These omissions could lead to unpredictable system behavior and potential failures. After we changed the documentation and carried out the necessary checks, we received a clearer and more structured picture of the algorithm. It now covers all possible scenarios, which greatly improves its reliability:
Unidraw has a collaboration function – you can work directly on this board in parallel with two QA engineers or in tandem with a developer who can see exactly where the problems are, write comments and mark corrected sections of the algorithm.
Using Unidraw I received the following benefits:
1. Visibility of the work being performed, which makes it easier to track progress and plan actions.
2. Visualization of algorithms helps to better understand and identify potential problem areas.
3. The ability to work as a team allows you to collaborate more effectively with colleagues and quickly respond to comments and suggestions.
About how good it is when the team understands where to develop the product
Seryozha Nikitin
At T-Bank Data Platform, I am responsible for goal-setting processes, project management practices and the implementation of a number of strategic projects. Unidraw began to be used from the moment it appeared.
We worked at Miro for a long time and at some point began to look for an alternative, but we did not find something that completely covered our needs. As a result, they began to cry and inject themselves, but switched to Whiteboard, which grew and became Unidraw. I found my letter from October 2023, when I was just trying out a new tool with my colleagues:
Less than a year has passed, and the team has already closed all the blocking problems, and the gap remains only in less critical features. This is all to say that it’s really great when the team understands where the product needs to be developed, makes it user-friendly and in an adequate time frame.
That's what we do at Unidraw.
Drawing the Data Platform architecture. It just so happens that I am the keeper of the picture of the current Data Platform architecture: in 2021 I began to put together some kind of general scheme for the interaction of our products. First, for my own understanding, in order to understand all the nuances of the interaction of 30-50 individual products and services, and then the same turned out to be in demand for others – I regularly conduct lectures for new leads on our platform.
At some point in early 2024, it became clear that the feature gap between Miro and Unidraw had been reduced enough and the scheme could be transferred. It turned out surprisingly not painful. I expected that I would have to change something in the circuit, that everything would slow down, or that some other problems would arise. But none of the fears came true.
The transfer took working day, and since then this picture has lived and been updated in Unidraw. It is looked at by dozens of Platform employees every month when they need to better understand what the Data Platform is all about.
Success with this scheme allowed us to believe in the capabilities of the product and try to transfer more complex processes to it.
Aligning management goals. In our goal-setting framework, teams publish their goals for the coming quarter, and after a general challenge of priorities, alignment occurs. A circle of managers responsible for domains gathers, and together they try to understand what will ultimately fit into the capacity of their teams. We have more than 10 such domains (Ingest, ETL, BI, DE practices, etc.) and the vast majority of domains have about 5 teams.
The event results in the need to simultaneously work with several hundred goal cards: move them, connect them, color them – and at once a fairly large composition. We held this event at the end of June, everything again went as smoothly as possible. The result is this beauty:
Unidraw, IMHO, is quite mature. A year ago, I began to cover the basic needs for local use: Mind Map, temporary diagrams for demonstrations, space for facilitating discussions, and the like. Over the past year, Unidraw has clearly strengthened its ability to work with large and large-scale projects – now it’s not scary and works out of the box. All you have to do is screw the tables in place and it will be absolutely sweet.
How to plan 100,500 related products with a large number of customers
Stas Medvedev
About a year ago we decided to try general management planning that would take into account all of our products at once. In our last planning session, we used Unidraw to plan six related products at once.
Our introductions:
About a hundred people are involved in planning: representatives of product teams and their stakeholders.
There are many dependencies between products that you want to install and visualize.
Product stakeholders often overlap, so you need to give them a common tool for interacting with product team planning.
We need the ability to collect tasks for which at this point in time there is no entity in the tracker yet.
We now have six steps in overall management planning.
Make the essence of the card. We wanted to highlight the main information on the task so that it was not continuous text and was visually separated. The card is assembled from three blocks and then grouped.
Prepare a table with monthly iterations, in which teams will place their cards during planning. The mechanics of collecting such a table are similar to the previous step. We create blocks, assemble them into a table and group them so that nothing gets lost. The result is a workpiece:
Collect requests from stakeholders. Wait until the products and their customers conduct initial communications and formulate their task sets for the next quarter.
Fill the backlog with product teams. Products are forming their backlogs for the coming quarter, which has yet to be planned.
Prepare plans for the quarter taking into account the vision of product teams, customer requests, as well as team capacities and scope of tasks.
At this stage, the key is communication, so the team collects all intermediate artifacts locally.
Prepare your part of the board. After plans are formed, teams copy the card and fill it out. One card – one feature that brings value to the user. Then the card is transferred to the appropriate iteration: July, August or September – and connections between tasks are indicated, if any.
As a result, we get a large artifact that reflects the plans of most management products for the next quarter:
What advantages we found:
Using Unidraw, you can organize collaboration between several large teams at once.
Sharilka with one button.
A wide range of tools that allows you to assemble a board for quite specific tasks.
We were able to successfully migrate from Miro to Unidraw without losing much in convenience for end users. Difficulties arose only in the preparation of templates, which were then successfully reused.
Work routine is more interesting with Unidraw
Dima Kuznetsov
I am responsible for the Mobile DevPlatform direction. We use Unidraw to conduct knowledge sharing meetings, event storming and AI retrospectives.
Sharing meetings are important because:
The volume of tasks is growing, and with it the size of teams, so it is important for us to be aware of what is happening in the neighboring product.
We have a vast geography – the guys from our direction are scattered from Sevastopol to Almaty. We want to maintain the platform vibe even in a remote format.
Typically, only one speaker has time to speak and answer questions during one meeting. The performance requirements are simple: listeners must understand the speaker, it is not necessary to make slides, it is better to show simple visualizations, performance is voluntary.
We pay special attention to filling out the list of topics for speeches and analyze what is interesting to the team so that the meetings do not stall. This is where Unidraw comes into our process: at the end of each meeting, we ask the team to add new topics to the board, if any have appeared.
There are two types of topics: the first is those that you are ready to talk about yourself, the second is that you are interested in listening to others perform. Then we vote: everyone chooses the options that interest them most, and we determine the winner.
On the board There is an example of what it looks like here.
Event storming is another application of Unidraw. This method allows you to visualize complex business processes. Essentially, this is a workshop where participants explore a business process, describe its domain events and study the relationships between them. Event storming allows you to clearly see the entire process, identify problem areas and outline ways for improvement.
An example of this approach was the recent discussion about migrating to a new version of Xcode. As the volume of code and the number of teams involved in the work grew, the process became more complex. We made a complete visualization of the process, identified bottlenecks and made decisions to optimize them.
For event storming we use a pre-prepared template. It helps to structure the process and divide it into several stages with clear instructions for participants.
With Unidraw, retrospectives are more interesting. We generate a scenario for a retrospective using the LLM model – we use Chat GPT, but others can be used.
Example prompt: “Prepare a plan for conducting a retrospective for the software development team. Our team holds retrospectives every two weeks. Its goal is to identify possible problems and areas for improving software development processes. The retrospective is held as part of an online meeting using a common online board unidraw.io (similar to Miro). The duration of the meeting is one hour. The plan should contain the structure of the meeting with possible options for conducting its individual blocks (for each block, offer 3 options for the format of the meeting; try to offer the most interesting and unusual options):
1. Ice Breaker – necessary to warm up the team and activate creative thinking.
2. Collection of information – needed to collect possible problems or areas for further work.
3. Selecting the most important topics for discussion – this is necessary to cut off the unimportant and focus on the important.
4. Discussion of selected topics – here it is necessary to study the identified problems in detail, find their causes and formulate the first steps towards a solution.
5. Completion of the retrospective – summing up and feedback.”
After generating the script, we paste it into a new unidraw.io board and start the meeting; the preparation process takes 5-7 minutes. Some formats are very funny, the last format will be appreciated by experts in memology:
The team votes on issues after collecting them in the second stage:
This format is more fun than a regular retrospective, but sometimes we don’t have time to sort through all the issues highlighted. We plan to alternate the new format with a classic retrospective. Example of the latest retrospective script is on the board.
Unidraw has firmly strengthened its position in our team. Here are some useful links to say goodbye:
