Product Design Question

“Walk me through how you would design X product.”  This could be asked with, “Walk me through how you might design an alarm clock for someone who is blind.  Walk me through how you might design a better wallet.  Walk me through how you might design an elevator for handicapped individuals.”  

This is a question you could be asked by a client, internal or external, in your journey to bringing a new product to market and we will discuss how you’d answer it in a concise, but productive way.  What you’ll want to do is have a framework in mind.  The framework would be as follows.

1. Ask clarifying questions, i.e. who might the wallet be used by? And what does better mean in the context of a wallet?
2. Communicate your answer outline, i.e. “Now that I understand the scope of this project I’d like to layout how I’d approach the design of this project.”  

          a.  First I’m going to reiterate what my business goals are. i.e. revenue, adoption, better conversion, etc.

          b.  Second I’ll identify my customer base and their use cases.

          c.  Third I’m going to brainstorm some features and evaluate the features against the business goals listed.  

          d.  Lastly I’ll discuss tradeoffs and summarize my recommendation.  

3. Identify the users and their use cases.  Could draw on whiteboard two columns.  Users on left hand side and use cases on right.  After listing the various users you’d ask which of the users the interviewer would like to focus on.  
4. Identify gaps in their use cases or room for improvement.  Could create a third column to list these. 
5. Brainstorm features and improvements.  Brainstorm solutions/features that address the gaps.  Ask the client if you’re on the right track or not. 
6. Prioritize and identify trade-offs of each feature/improvement.  Could be revenue generating vs time and cost to develop it.  Or by customer satisfaction.  Walk through pros and cons of each feature/improvement so you show you’re thinking about all facets of product.  
7. Summarize your recommendation.  

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly walk a client through how you’d design something for a product they need released to the market.

Create a New Product

If you are a Product Owner chances are you're not the one that will be coming up with a new product that the company is going to create.  Hypothetically though say you are at a startup and they want you to create additional revenue streams and so you’ll need to identify and validate a problem.  I’d recommend using a whiteboard to map out a structure or outline of how you’d find users, what questions you’d ask, and how I’d document their needs.  What follows is a framework you could use to do so.

1. Discuss prioritization methods.  What prioritization frameworks have you used in the past, i.e. rev vs time and cost to develop vs cust satisfaction or adoption.
2. Walk through how you would document requirements with users interviews and feedback and provide wireframes with tools like Lucidchart, Balsamiq, Axure, etc.  If you write specs take some time to walk through how you write them. 
3. Explain how you’d work with other teams to build the product.  Explain using agile (MVP and quick iteration) vs waterfall (planning for all possible outcomes, costs, features, etc up front) for the product being developed.  Walk through execution process and how you’d work with teams like engineering and design.  Walk through how you’d engage with the design team.  Do you like to provide more or less guidance?  How often do you check in with designers?  Explain how you’d work with engineering to cost and assess the technical designs that are proposed as well as how you would test the product to ensure product quality.  
4. Discuss launch plan and how you would track success.  Would you be conducting a beta test with a limited number of users?  Define which metrics you’d be tracking to measure success. 

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly walk a client through how you’d create a new product they need released to the market.

Improve an Existing Product

A core responsibility of a Product Owner is to always be improving and iterating on a product by adding value to it and its users.  If a client asks you how you’d improve an existing product here is a simple framework you could follow.

1. Discuss the product’s objective - keep it high level.
2. Figure out what the product needs to reach its objectives.  Here are a list of questions you’d start with and then drill down from there based on the answers you received.

           a.  What have you noticed about the product on its way to reaching its objective?  What has it been successful or not successful at doing? 

                 i.  Think acquisition funnel = acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.  

           b.  Does the product seem to have a hard time acquiring or activating users?  Does the product have features that encourage users to stick around for a long time?  Does the product have enough drivers that could incentivize users to convert into paying customers?  Is there a strong reason for the product to have users refer or recommend it to other users? 

3. Brainstorm improvements for these needs.  Which of the needs is the highest priority for the product and come up with ideas using that priority.  Or ask which need the interviewer needs you to focus on.  Explain your own prioritization first.  With ideas for improvements come up with short and long term implementations.  
4. Lay out your execution plan and success criteria.  With each improvement discuss the pros and cons or costs and benefits of each.  Explore how you’d roll out the execution plan in the short, mid, and long term with your improvement ideas and how you’d launch them.  Short = increasing revenue by improving the completion rate of purchases then briefly discuss how you might conduct split tests around the shopping cart experience.  Explain success metrics for each idea, i.e. for shopping cart is a 10% increase in purchase completion.  Additionally you’ll want to list out the metrics you plan to track in order to confirm the success of this improvement.

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly walk a client through how you’d improve a product they need released to the market.

Favorite Product Question Walkthrough

If you’re interviewing for Product Owner type positions it won’t be uncommon to be asked what your favorite product is.  Resist the urge to pick the latest iPhone or app if you can because the interviewer will already have heard that answer a half dozen times up to that point of calling through a list of 12 candidates over the phone or perhaps even in person.  Instead try and think of something that is unique and that you can actually speak to because you’ve used it.  Bonus points would be to use something that is relevant to the company you’re interviewing with.  What follows is a general framework of how you’d answer that question and how I’d answer it.

1. What is the product and what does it do?  The product is called PEP, Paint Estimating Program.  Initially in my painting business we were guessing on the cost of each project and then we were trying to come up with our own rates for production.  Then we upgraded to this software that is automated, mobile, and uses the PDCA rates of production when doing measurements.  It also integrates with our quickbooks, time clock software, and scheduling applications.  
2. Who are its competitors and what makes this product better?  Estimate rocket, The Paint Estimator, One-Step Estimating, Planswift, and many online spreadsheets from various contractors.  PEP is better because it already has PDCA standards loaded in, everything is stored in the cloud, it has automated follow up after estimates, syncs with quickbooks, customizable presentations to customers, gives feedback timewise on how long what content was viewed on the bid and in what order for AB testing opportunities, as well as workflow management and scheduling capabilities.  
3. How did you first hear about this product and what keeps you continually using it?  At a painting conference I went to learn more about the industry and how to set myself apart from my competitors and what others around the country who were successful were doing.  I keep using it because the price point is affordable, great support and training was and is excellent, and the product is really easy to use and intuitive once you have the basics down.  It makes us much faster by giving estimates the same day, makes us more professional looking, and takes out the guesswork for various rates of production you might not have exposure to prior to showing up for a certain job.
4. Product features/product strategy - Despite how amazing this product is its ability to integrate with our time clock software and assign crews/painters to projects created.  It needs to add the ability to plan and schedule more than one crew at a time.  That would be a short term implementation that would make a big impact.  Long term letting customers check in on the status of a project via their application would be helpful as well.  

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly walk an interviewer through what your favorite product is right now.

Pricing a Product

So you’ve gone through the rigamarole of coming up with a product that solves a need in the marketplace and you’ve validated your solution with potential users, but now you need to figure out how much to charge people to use said product.  What follows is a framework you could use to try and solve this conundrum internally with your team or by yourself.

1. Ask clarifying questions.  Ask for background information on internal costs and pricing or competitor prices and costs.  
2. Customer’s willingness to pay.  What is the maximum a customer is willing to pay?  BATNA - Best alternative to a negotiated agreement, i.e. if Enterprise charges $40/day to rent a car then say our car rental app is the first of its kind with automated driverless cars coming then we’d price around that.
3. Competitive pricing.  Use alamo, rent-a-car, hertz, etc.  Write out advantages and disadvantages of my product and why it skews my pricing one way or the other.  
4. Cost-based pricing.  Takes into account the cost of the product and adds markup afterwards to come up with the price.  You would tally up the unit cost, literal cost of the item, as well as the overhead cost.  May include rent, shipping, or stocking fees as well.  Unit cost of a rental car would be $15/day.  Overhead costs would be parking, maintenance, insurance add another $10/day for a total cost of $25/day.  Add 40% markup results in a price to users of $35/day for car rental.
5. Maximizing profits is typically the first priority, but others may present themselves as more important.  You may want to maximize market share by lowering the price, which could produce network effects, i.e. product value goes up as more people use that product.  May price product higher to give the product a higher perceived value. 
6. Could use supply/demand curves to also help in coming up with a price.  

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly determine what price you could charge a paying client for using your product.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Inbound and outbound marketing are two types of marketing that you can use to bring users to you.  Inbound is where your tactics and methods bring the users to you whereas outbound revolves more around buying ads, buying spots on email lists, buying sales leads and then reaching out to those people.  Both are effective at reaching your target audience and we’ll discuss briefly both.

Inbound marketing is here to stay and often comes across as more genuine.  One method for inbound marketing is content marketing.  This doesn’t mean needing to buy an ad, but would require time spent on behalf of the marketing person writing content say for a blog or paying someone to write the content.  This written content would be things like seo, email newsletters, blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies.  This customer progression would look something like: Read some articles/blog posts -> Sign up as a subscriber -> Purchase product.  

Outbound marketing is more of a traditional approach to marketing.  Typical examples of this would be buying ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Another option would be using affiliate marketing where someone works to sell your product for you and they take a cut of each sale sent to you.  The goal with either channel of marketing, but especially outbound marketing is to make sure that the cost of acquiring the customer is less than the lifetime value of the customer else it doesn’t make sense to continue that paid service.  If you spend $1 to get a customer you want to earn more than that $1 over the life of working with that customer.

Product Backlog

In a nutshell a product backlog is a prioritized feature list that contains short descriptions of all the functionality desired in that particular feature.  While the PO is in charge of the product backlog not all of the ideas should be flowing from you.  As the PO you’ll be getting ideas from everywhere and it is your responsibility to triage, organize, and prioritize them.  Ideas may come from user feedback, making feature lists around what competitors are doing, or you’ll get feature requests from your own internal teams. 

Users may give ideas to you, but they may not be your customers.  Users may submit ideas via Zendesk tickets, web submission forms, forums like Reddit and others, internal teams/employees or social media.  These submissions may be complaints about the product or processes within it or what they wish they had.  You could build things with word clouds.  

Customers are different from users.  Say your product lies in the educational games arena.  While children are the users the customers end up being the parents buying the product.  

Metrics could also be a way to gather ideas to be added to your product backlog.  This can be any kind of quantitative data that you can get in or from your product.  

It may be important to also list any bugs or any technical work within the backlog.  Prioritizing the list will require consistent communication and interaction with relevant stakeholders so that you are bringing forth the most relevant and valuable features to your product.  

When maintaining a backlog there are many tools you can use, but for those just starting out an easy tool to use is google spreadsheets.  The first column you’d want to add is Date Added.  This will show you when something was added and allow easy sorting for that.  The next column would be Feature Idea Name.  Then after that you’d have the description, i.e. what is overview and desired functionality of this suggested feature. 

If you’re backlog contains a bug there are a few things you’ll want to include when adding it to the backlog.  One you only want one bug report in a story and be sure it has a clear title and proper grammar in the report.  You need simple and repeatable reproduction steps.  Include expected results and observed results.  Screenshots or other pictures of bug in action when user interfaces are involved.  You’ll also want to include the build/version/release where bug was found as not all customers are always on the same release.  

Prioritization criteria will vary by team and company, but it is on the product owner to come to a consensus on how this should look.  Three pretty standard criteria that can be used are impact, urgency, and engineering cost. 

Impact or importance is a way to define in a subjective manner whether or not this particular feature idea would move an important metric.  A high numerical score here using a scale of 1 - 5, with 5 being equal to high importance vs a 1, which would indicate low importance. 

Urgency would be asking the question of how important it is to get this feature out now.  1 being not urgent and 5 being very urgent.  So even though something may be impactful doesn’t necessarily translate into something being urgent.  Maybe users would be saying that something is really affecting their workflow and cutting down on their efficiency and is something that needs to get worked on right away even though this feature might not have the same impact as something else score wise.  

Engineering cost is typically where you’d want to involve someone else, i.e. an engineering manager or a high level developer you’re very close with if you don’t have the technical expertise yourself.  Scoring these stories on a scale of 1 - 5 would have 1 representing something as slow to build (1 month) with 5 being quick to build (1 day). 

Other is another column you could have in your backlog.  There are other potential prioritization criteria to consider outside of the ones already mentioned.  

You’ll want to have a total and status set of columns in your backlog as well.  Total would be a sum of any of the prioritization criteria you gave values to earlier.  Status would detail where the feature is at the moment.  It would include things like whether it needs more definition or to be reviewed even further or to be slotted into a development cycle or sprint.  The target launch date would also be listed in your status column. 

Holding periodic check-ins with relevant stakeholders to prioritize your backlog will ensure you are releasing the most valuable things for them and the company.  

Usability Testing

The goal of usability testing is to get feedback from real users primarily by having users complete a set of tasks within your prototype using a script that you will provide.  This feedback is to ensure that they can understand and use your application and feature as intended as well as to gather suggestions for improvements to the product or features being tested.  If they can’t then it is during this time that you’re keying in to where they got stuck or had questions.

For your script you’re going to want to start with a quick introduction, i.e., “Thank you for coming in today and for giving some feedback.  Today we’d like you to go through this prototype doing a few set tasks to test the product.  We’re not testing you, but the product itself.  If you would please think aloud as you’re completing these tasks so we can gather as much info from you as possible.  You’re not offending me with any commentary you provide.”  We do this so that our participants feel very comfortable and they give us as much honesty as possible so that we aren’t led down the wrong path in developing our products and features. 

After the initial intro you’ll want to get some context around the user’s existing behaviors and workflows.  You’ll want to ask them open-ended questions like who, what, where, when, and why.  These questions will tell you how your user behaves and will structure and adapt the tasks you’re about to give them so that it fits whatever they were doing before.  A few examples of questions you’d want to ask would be:

• When was the last time you did X?
• Can you give me a specific example of what you were doing during that time?

After your intro and introductory questions you’ll then show them the rough prototype.  You’ll explain that the screens you’ve done are just mock ups and they aren’t all perfectly functional and that I’ll point out the times I know something isn’t functional.  From here you’ll make sure to take copious notes, check to make sure they actually completed the task, and you’ll want to understand contextual points.  This could be things like seeing the user get stuck at a certain point, seeing them click somewhere expecting to be taken somewhere, but didn’t.  

Be sure to ask follow up questions.  Asking, “What did you think was going to happen when you X?”  or “Is there any other way you might have tried to do that?” or “What did you expect would happen when you clicked on that button?”.  Commentary from them after these would allow you to take the feedback to improve your product. 

When you’re wrapping up you’re going to want to ask debrief questions.  Questions you could ask would be, “What did you like or dislike about this current prototype?” or “What are some features or functionality you would’ve liked in this prototype?” or “What parts of this page were very important for you?”

An example of a usability test script I’ve created follows here:

Usability Test Script Template

1. Introduction

Take some time to make your participant feel comfortable and use this opportunity to set

some expectations for the usability test.

Items to mention include:

“Thanks for coming in today; we really appreciate your time and your frank feedback. This is an

informal session where we’ll be going through a prototype and we’re not testing you, we’re

testing the product.”

“Please think aloud as you complete these tasks.”

“I didn’t design this product so please be as honest as possible and don’t worry about hurting

my feelings or offending me.”

2. User Context Exploration

Ask open ended questions to get to know your participant and better understand their current

workflows & behaviors in relation to the prototype that you’d like to test. A few examples of

questions include:

“When was the last time you did X?”

“Can you give me a specific example of what you were doing at that time?”

3. Tasks

Here is where you have a series of tasks laid out for your participant to complete. Again, you

want to set expectations that your prototype is not going to be 100% functional. Remember to

take detailed notes when your participant is going through these tasks!

Task 1:  Login as a production manager and create a new project.

Task 2:  Login as a crew member to see how far along John S., a customer, and his project is.  Clock in and then complete the project as a crew member.

Task 3:  Login as a customer.  Check the existing comments and then also add one of your own.

Also remember to follow-up with relevant questions as your participant is going through tasks,

I.e.:

“I noticed you tried to do [x], what did you think was going to happen there?”

“Is there any other way you would have tried to do that?”

“What did you expect would happen when you clicked on that button?”

3. De-brief / Wrap-up

Use the last few minutes to ask high level debriefing questions to get further insights. You

might want to ask questions like:

“What did you like/dislike about this prototype?”

“What are some features or functionality you wish you had here?”

“Which parts of this page were very important to you?”

Wireframing

Wireframing is a cost and time efficient way to showcase your product or features and what it will look like to users, development, and designers so they can get a feel for what to expect.  It is a good idea to start by using the tried and true pen and paper.  This helps to avoid getting stuck on the details when you’re first starting out, i.e. not freaking out about aligning the text, all the boxes are the same width, whether it is responsive on mobile devices, etc.  It also helps to flush out creative ideas for the product. 

When you’re starting create a list of information you want to get across to your users.  What kind of screens will be involved and what type of information will be on those screens that you want the user to know about or act upon.  You’ll want to do this for every single page on your app, i.e. home page, account creation/login page, dashboard page, etc.

Doing this will lead you to an information architecture.  This will help you think about how your end user is going to navigate through your product.  To that end folding a piece of paper twice so that when unfolded you have four boxes you can then draw out quickly four different versions of each screen you may have for your product.  Don’t worry about being perfect with these because the team and designers are likely going to change and or throw out a lot of what you came up with anyways in order to increase aesthetics and speed.  When doing these though aim to create something where you don’t have to make your users think.  Less = More. 

Wireframing tools that you can use would be balsamic or azure.  Interactive prototypes would be like envision app.  After you’ve completed your wireframing and uploaded it into an interactive prototype program or application the next step would be to then sit down with a user to see if your wireframe turned prototype is actually user friendly.  So get to it and see what your users think!

How to Create a User Persona or Avatar

Your company is rockin and rollin.  You’ve got good people in place, your branding is on point, and your core product is sky high.  You want to expand and compliment your team and product with another dynamic product in a new segment that you see opportunity in.  Where do you start?  For starters you need to truly understand your customer and creating a persona or avatar is one way of doing that.  What follows is a structure I use to discover what unique problems your business solves for your customer.  We’ll have a better idea of the kind of story could you tell to help you connect with your customer and what things your products or service do to solve these fears and frustrations.

Now we’re going to build your customer avatar or persona…..

Who is your customer?

Age?  

Gender?

Socioeconomic status = how much money they make?

Spending Habits?   

Personality?  

Name?  

Photo?  

Where does your customer hang out?

Newspapers, magazines, websites?  

Physical locations, conferences, retreats?  

Other businesses they frequent?  

Pains & Problems?

Customer fears?

Pains?

Frustrations?

Hidden costs?  

Financial?

Physical?

Emotional?

Opportunities?

Financial?

Physical?

Emotional?

Small tweaks?

What is a Spec?

A spec is a document that is written to allow people to understand a product’s purpose, functionality, and or features.  It should be comprehensive and understandable so that anyone without any prior context could be able to properly understand the product or feature that is outlined.  A detailed spec won’t solve every possible problem, but it should be written so that you can think through as many possible problems as you can and minimize any surprise situations that could come up.  Once the team starts work you may find that some or many of the things outlined in the spec aren’t able to be implemented and so you need to be flexible for what it will actually turn out to be.

The following is a spec I use in my work as a Product Owner.

Spec Template

Product / Feature Name: What is this product / feature called?

Painting Project Progress

Author Name(s): Who wrote this spec?  

Brock Norton

Team Members: Who are the stakeholders involved in this product / feature? This provides context for other teams reading your spec so they know who they might want to reach out to for further details.

Brock Norton, Renee Norton, Tammy Lasman

Summary / Background:  What is the context of this product / feature? For example, if this is a user-facing product/feature, what is the current situation for your users and at a high level, what will this product / feature functionally do?

This will be a web application that production managers, crew members, and customers can log in to to clock in and out on a specific project,check the progress of a project being completed so that scheduling from the PM and customer standpoint can occur without having to call or text people to see where things are at with the project.

Terminology:  List any terms that you plan to newly introduce with this product / feature. Explain in concise language what these terms mean in relation to this product / feature. If you can avoid it, try not to introduce too many new terms that might confuse other team members.

N/A

Goals: What are the goals of launching this product / feature?

Track project progress for scheduling and customer service purposes.

Success Metrics: How will you be measuring success of this product / feature? You may want to list quantitative / qualitative criteria that you will be evaluating. Every product / feature you release should have some sort of measurable success metric!

Eliminate text or call check ins by painters to production manager and subsequently production manager to customer.  Will be able to see if a project came under/over budget timewise with the customer facing portion and budget wise with the production manager as well as with time budget.

Target Audience: Who are the target users for this product / feature? Provide some context as to what they are currently doing or any existing workflows / behaviors. If you have any existing research on user personas, make sure to include that context here. If you need to make any assumptions about your target audience, make note of that here.

Production managers, crew members, customers.  When a painter is assigned a project they clock in under that project, but it doesn’t give them, the production manager, or the customer, any indication of how far along in the project the crew member is.  If they want to find that out the production manager needs to tally up the hours, compare it to the project’s budget, then update the customer accordingly.  Additionally this updating of roadblocks or impediments may be hard to communicate due to phone tag issues between the crew member, PM, and customer whereas there would be a place within the app to upload a picture or string of text to give a status update on the project or any issues within the project.

Requirements:

#	User Need	User Stories	Launch Phase
1	User needs are one of, if not the most important portion of any product / Feature. Prior to even worrying about your user stories or solutions, you should have clearly defined user needs (remember as a PM, you’re a champion for your users and you should be completely in-tune with the needs that your team is building for!) A user need can follow a template like: needs a way to	User stories are short descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the user who desires the new Capability. A user story generally follows a template like: As a , I want so that Sometimes, a user story may cover a large amount of functionality. In these cases, these stories may be referred to as ‘epics’ and may need to broken out into individual, smaller user stories.	While it’s important to be thinking of every possible user need /story from the get-go, the reality of development is that without unlimited resources, you’ll generally be time-boxed and therefore will need to prioritize which user stories are important for an initial MVP launch vs. a V2 launch. This column section will specify which phase this story should launch in.
2	Crew member/production manager/customer needs a way to quickly and easily see how long till a project is completed for scheduling purposes.	As a crew member, I want to see what my hours for the day did to impact the overall progress on the project so that I can see if I’m over or under budget to earn bonuses for coming under budget on a project.	MVP
3	needs a way to	As a production manager, I want to see end of day progress on a project and any comments on issues for the day so that I can resolve issues and update the customer if needed without having to play phone tag via call or text with the crew member to gather said information.	MVP
4		As a customer, I want to log in to the app to see how far along the project is to being completed so that I can plan for my next project, vacation, family visiting, etc.	MVP

User Story Details:

1. User Story

As mentioned in the previous section, sometimes a user story may cover a large

amount of functionality. In these cases, these stories may be referred to as ‘epics’ and may need to broken out into individual, smaller user stories.

You may want to include this details section so that you can take the time to provide any extra context / details for the user story and/or use this section to break the epic into smaller individual stories.

Along with the extra context / details, you can also include “user story conditions” that explain scenarios you want to ensure the user story is covering. For example, if your user story was “As a user, I want a credit card drop-down option so that I can select which credit card I want to pay with,” then you might have user story conditions that say something like: “The credit card drop-down options should include: Amex,Mastercard, Visa.”

Additionally, you may want to include any screenshots / wireframes / design

presentations that can help provide visual context for the user story. This helps guide the reader into better understanding the functional use of this particular story.

User can log in via Facebook, twitter, or google.

      2.  User Story

Write details about User Story 2.

Crew member can clock in and out on a project where the production manager has set the hours budgeted for a project.

      3.  User Story

            Write details about User Story 3.

           

Customer can login to see project progress at the end of each day.

Designs: If you plan on handing off this spec for a designer, you’ll want to consider adding a timeline of what deliverables you expect to receive from the designer. If you have final designs / prototype already for the product / feature, feel free to include or link to them in this section.

Sprint one design should have wireframing and prototype design completed.  Web portal design should be completed by sprint two.

Legal: If there are any potential legal issues / implications, you’ll want to include any relevant context / details in this section. I.e. perhaps your product / feature involves collecting sensitive user data and your legal team has specified that this data needs to be held on record in a database for a minimum time period.

N/A

Launch / Roll-Out Plan & Timeline: What are the logistics and timeline of this launch? You may want to have a separate launch checklist that you link to in this section. If you only plan to roll-out this product / feature to a select group of users, make sure to detail that in this section.

One month from initial sprint planning all wireframing, prototyping should be completed.  Users should be able to login to clock in and out during this initial sprint.  Sprint two should have the ability for the production manager to set the hours on a project and crew members can clock in and out on said project.  Sprint three will have a spot for the crew member to add comments or pictures of issues on the project.