Agile, Scrum & Kanban

Organizational Scalability

When a company grows to the point where multiple teams are needed, it is important to ensure that each team has a clear vision and scope, and that there is minimal friction between teams. This can be done by breaking the company up into teams of six to ten people, setting up two levels of management, and preventing duplication of efforts or fights. This type of organizational scalability is key to a company's success.

Stumbling into chaos

The new director of engineering at a startup had to jump in on day one when the team had just done a re-org and re-oriented the product roadmap. He met with the CTO and engineering leads to understand why the new structure had been put in place, then worked with the product managers to focus on pieces they had high certainty of needing. He also added weekly planning meetings for each product team and daily standups to create structure and accountability. Through retros and feedback, he tailored these initial short-term fixes to their needs. He learned that plans often go awry and we have to adapt, look for short-term engineering work when long-term plans change, and creating a predictable process cadence can help create stability.

Redesigning our dev process from scratch

Following a reorganization, a manager was tasked with defining work processes. After a few months, it was clear that the process was inefficient and needed to be changed. The manager and PM designed a new process with fewer stages, an estimation stage, and enforced it with Jira. This has improved efficiency, visibility, and deliverability. The manager learned that simpler processes, investing in tools, and taking estimations into account are key principles for successful process design.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

Removing disruptive team member[s] will vastly improve productivity and morale

In a previous role, a manager noticed that a scrum team was not working well despite being highly motivated and technically strong. After attending meetings and speaking with team members, it became clear that one senior engineer was challenging almost any proposal or decision, causing the team to hesitate and decisions to take three times longer than needed. The manager decided to remove the engineer from the team, and the remaining team of four became more productive shortly after. This reinforced the importance of staying close to a team's dynamics and identifying early obstacles to achieving smooth collaboration and an agile tempo.

Finding a Routine That Works for a Distributed Engineering Team

This article outlines the challenges of finding a daily stand up time that suits everyone and the absence of a development process. The author was able to build a process together, stick to it, and continuously refine it. They established a routine with daily stand-ups, bi-weekly product demos, sprint plannings & grooming sessions, and monthly retrospectives. The lesson learned is that there is always room for improvement and it is important to enable and encourage the team to allow for such improvements to happen.