Establishing Shared Value

The first step of any contribution—design, code, or documentation—is establishing the shared value for the proposed feature or enhancement. To ensure the System provides the highest shared value, contributions to MDS should be relevant to three or more product teams.

Identifying other products or use cases that may benefit from your proposed contribution not only helps define requirements, but also establishes key partners to collaborate with while designing and building the contribution. The Design and Engineering MDS channels on Microsoft Teams are great places to connect with other teams to pitch your proposed contribution and gauge shared need.

Defining Shared Requirements

Once you have identified the products that will use your contribution, the next step is to work with those teams to define a set of shared requirements. These are some important questions to help get you started:

• Will a single design serve the needs of every team, or does the feature require multiple configurations or variations to meet different design requirements?
  • If multiple configurations are required, can these be managed as variations on a common pattern? Or are they better treated as separate requirements?
• What functional requirements are shared across teams? Do any teams have unique requirements?
• What needs to be strictly defined and where can things be left flexible?

What to Do if You’re Unable to Establish Shared Value

If you are unable to establish shared value for your contribution across three products, consider how to use existing MDS parts to build the feature you need within your own product.

If you feel that your contribution still makes sense, you can always start a conversation with the MDS core team.