When we conduct moderated research, like user interviews or usability tests, for our clients, we encourage them to observe as many sessions as possible. We find when clients see us interview their users, and get real-time responses, they’re able to learn about the needs of their users in real-time and be more active participants in the process. One way we help clients feel engaged with the process during remote sessions is to establish a real-time communication backchannel that empowers clients to flag responses they’d like to dig into further and to share their ideas for follow-up questions.

There are several benefits to establishing a communication backchannel for moderated sessions:

• Everyone on the team, including both internal and client team members, can be actively involved throughout the data collection process rather than waiting to passively consume findings.
• Team members can identify follow-up questions in real-time which allows the moderator to incorporate those questions during the current session, rather than just considering them for future sessions.
• Subject matter experts can identify more detailed and specific follow-up questions that the moderator may not think to ask.
• Even though the whole team is engaged, a single moderator still maintains control over the conversation which creates a consistent experience for the participant.

If you’re interested in creating your own backchannel, here are some tips to make the process work smoothly:

• Use the chat tool that is already being used on the project. In most cases, we use a joint Slack workspace for the session backchannel but we’ve also used Microsoft Teams.
• Create a dedicated channel like #moderated-sessions. Conversation in this channel should be limited to backchannel discussions during sessions. This keeps the communication consolidated and makes it easier for the moderator to stay focused during the session.
• Keep communication limited. Channel participants should ask basic questions that are easy to consume quickly. Supplemental commentary and analysis should not take place in the dedicated channel.
• Use emoji responses. The moderator can add a quick thumbs up to indicate that they’ve seen a question.

Introducing backchannels for communication during remote moderated sessions has been a beneficial change to our research process. It not only provides an easy way for clients to stay engaged during the data collection process but also increases the moderator’s ability to focus on the most important topics and to ask the most useful follow-up questions.

At Viget, we’ve brought on more than a few new Project Managers over the past couple of years, as we continue to grow. The awesome new people we’ve hired have ranged in their levels of experience, but some of them are earlier in their careers and need support from more experienced PMs to develop their skills and flourish.

We have different levels of training and support for new PMs. These broadly fall into four categories:

• Onboarding: Learning about Viget tools and processes
• Shadowing: Learning by watching others
• Pairing: Learning by doing collaboratively
• Leading: Learning by doing solo

Onboarding

In addition to conducting intro sessions to each discipline at Viget, new Viget PMs go through a lengthy set of training sessions that are specific to the PM lab. These include intros to:

Shadowing

After PMs complete the onboarding process, they start shadowing other PMs’ projects to get exposure to the different types of projects we run (since the variety is large). We cater length and depth of shadowing based on how much experience a PM has coming in. We also try to expose PMs to multiple project managers, so they can see how PM style differs person-to-person.

We’ve found that it can be most effective to have PMs shadow activities that are more difficult to teach in theory, such as shadowing a PM having a difficult conversation with a client, or shadowing a front-end build-out demo to see how the PM positions the meeting and our process to the client. More straightforward tasks like setting up a Harvest project could be done via pairing, since it’s easy to get the hang of with a little guidance.

Pairing

While shadowing is certainly helpful, we try to get PMs into pairing mode pretty quickly, since we’ve found that most folks learn better by doing than by watching. Sometimes this might mean having a new PM setting up an invoice or budget sheet for a client while a more experienced PM sits next to them, talking them through the process. We’ve found that having a newer PM lead straightforward activities with guidance tends to be more effective than the newer PM merely watching the more experienced PM do that activity.

Another tactic we take is to have both PMs complete a task independently, and then meet and talk through their work, with the more experienced PM giving the less experienced PM feedback. That helps the newer PM think through a task on their own, and gain experience, but still have the chance to see how someone else would have approached the task and get meaningful feedback.

Leading

Once new PMs are ready to be in the driver’s seat, they are staffed as the lead on projects. The timing of when someone shifts into a lead role depends on how much prior experience that person has, as well as what types of projects are actively ready to be worked on.

Most early-career project managers have a behind-the-scenes project mentor (another PM) on at least their first couple projects, so they have a dedicated person to ask questions and get advice from who also has more detailed context than that person’s manager would. For example, mentors often shadow key client and internal meetings and have more frequent check-ins with mentees. This might be less necessary at a company where all the projects are fairly similar, but at Viget, our projects vary widely in scale and services provided, as well as client needs. Because of this, there’s no “one size fits all” process and we have a significant amount of customization per project, which can be daunting to new PMs who are still getting the hang of things.

For these mentorship pairings, we use a mentorship plan document (template here) to help the mentor and mentee work together to define goals, mentorship focuses, and touchpoints. Sometimes the mentee’s manager will take a first stab at filling out the plan, other times, the mentor will start that process.

Management Touchpoints

Along the way, we make sure new PMs have touchpoints with their managers to get the level of support they need to grow and succeed. Managers have regular 1:1s with PMs that are referred to as “project 1:1s”, and are used for the managee to talk through and get advice on challenges or questions related to the projects they’re working on—though really, they can be used for whatever topics are on the managee’s mind. PMs typically have 1:1s with managers daily the first week, two to three times per week after that for the first month or so, then scale down to once per week, and then scale down to bi-weekly after the first six months.

In addition to project 1:1s, we also have monthly 1:1s that are more bigger-picture and focused on goal-setting and progress, project feedback from that person’s peers, reflection on how satisfied and fulfilled they’re feeling in their role, and talking through project/industry interests which informs what projects we should advocate for them to be staffed on. We have a progress log template that we customize per PM to keep track of goals and progress.

We try to foster a supportive environment that encourages growth, feedback, and experiential learning, but also that lets folks have the autonomy to get in the driver’s seat as soon as they’re comfortable. Interested in learning more about what it’s like to work at Viget? Check out our open positions here.

Working on website front ends I sometimes use MAMP PRO to manage local hosts and Sequel Pro to manage databases. Living primarily in my text editor, a terminal, and a browser window, moving to these click-heavy dedicated apps can feel clunky. Happily, the tasks I have most frequently turned to those apps for —starting and stopping servers, creating new hosts, and importing, exporting, deleting, and creating databases— can be done from the command line.

I still pull up MAMP PRO if I need to change a host's PHP version or work with its other more specialized settings, or Sequel Pro to quickly inspect a database, but for the most part I can stay on the keyboard and in my terminal. Here's how:

Command Line MAMP PRO

You can start and stop MAMP PRO's servers from the command line. You can even do this when the MAMP PRO desktop app isn't open.

Note: MAMP PRO's menu icon will not change color to reflect the running/stopped status when the status is changed via the command line.

• Start the MAMP PRO servers:

• Stop the MAMP PRO servers:

• Create a host (replace host_name and root_path):

MAMP PRO-friendly Command Line Sequel Pro

Note: if you don't use MAMP PRO, just replace the /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql with mysql.

In all of the following commands, replace username with your user name (locally this is likely root) and database_name with your database name. The -p (password) flag with no argument will trigger an interactive password prompt. This is more secure than including your password in the command itself (like -pYourPasswordHere). Of course, if you're using the default password root is not particular secure to begin with so you might just do -pYourPasswordHere.

Setting the -h (host) flag to localhost or 127.0.0.1 tells mysql to look at what's on localhost. With the MAMP PRO servers running, that will be the MAMP PRO databases.

• Create a local database

or

    MAMP PRO's databases are stored in /Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP PRO/db so to confirm that it worked you can

• Delete a local database

• Export a dump of a local database. Note that this uses mysqldump not mysql.

• Export a local dump from an external database over SSH. Note that this uses mysqldump not mysql.

• Import a local database dump into a local database

• Import a local database dump into a remote database over SSH. Use care with this one. But if you are doing it with Sequel Pro —maybe you are copying a Craft site's database from a production server to a QA server— you might as well be able to do it on the command line.

For me, using the command line instead of the MAMP PRO and Sequel Pro GUI means less switching between keyboard and mouse, less opening up GUI features that aren't typically visible on my screen, and generally better DX. Give it a try! And while MAMP Pro's CLI is limited to the essentials, command line mysql of course knows no limits. If there's something else you use Sequel Pro for, you may be able to come up with a mysql CLI equivalent you like even better.

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

• If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
• If you never want to see your users' data.
• If you're tired of dealing with databases.
• If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
• And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

• Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
• Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
• It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.