As a front-end developer, you get feedback. A lot of feedback.
Code reviews by other developers, and a lot of input from the rest of the team - designers, QA, product managers and maybe even the folks in marketing.
But the trouble is - and this is where the honesty comes in - this feedback usually sucks.
Because, more often than not, the feedback from the rest of the team comes back to you as a mess of unclear, isolated comments, sent to you at random times using a bunch of platforms that you would rather not be using in the first place.
To try and make life easier, many dev teams turn to tools like Vercel deploy previews as a way to better share progress with the other stakeholders on the team.
But this doesn’t help much. Because these environments just let everyone see what you’re up to. They don’t do anything to actually get you clearer, more coordinated feedback from the team.
The net effect of all this is lots of wasted time on non-development tasks as you try and piece together all this review feedback.
So what’s the solution?
Many dev teams we’ve spoken to take the “it is what it is” approach and basically ignore the problem. But ignoring the problem comes at a significant cost. According to a recent Venture Beat/KPMG study, developers are spending up to 80% of their work time on non-technical, administrative tasks.
So in effect, “not doing anything” about this problem is the production equivalent to a company letting go 4/5 of its developer resources while still maintaining the original KPIs and target delivery dates.
Good luck with that.
And this brings us to an admittedly shameless plug for our solution to this problem. Because Livecycle makes sure that the feedback you get from other stakeholders is clear, actionable and in context so you can address it quickly, and move on.
(If that TL;DR pitch has already exhausted your tolerance for marketing content and you don’t want to keep reading, you can just watch this video to see how Livecycle works):
Here’s how it works:
By installing Livecycle on your frontend repository, you turn your passive preview environment into an active, collaborative playground. With Livecycle, anyone who opens the preview environment will not only see your work, but they can also comment on it, in context, on top of the product UI.
Livecycle works together with your Vercel pipeline to add a layer of built-in tools that keep all review comments for you in one place, per-environment.
So the designers can leave you screenshots, QA can record a video of a problematic use case, and the folks in marketing can even edit the product copy and send it to you as a suggested change. And since everyone is working together in the same playground, you have everything you need in one place.
Livecycle also integrates with task management tools. We do the heavy lifting of making sure all the important review comments appear in all the right places. You’ll be free to spend more time building, coding, and fixing and you’ll spend less time with the administrative stuff, running between other apps and tools.
So, even though you are a developer and you are allergic to marketing (we know because we are developers too), we are inviting you to check out how Livecycle can make everyone’s feedback clear and actionable so you can resolve issues sooner, and push code to production without delays. There’s zero commitment and no catch.
Check us out at https://livecycle.io
