Sprint Cadence

Tips on How to Improve Backlog Grooming Meetings

A team was having difficulty with their grooming meetings, and senior engineers took the lead to understand the requirements and groom stories outside of the main room. They introduced release-when-ready strategies and feature flags to help with the release process. They also implemented data-driven standups and encouraged team members to dig deeper to understand the root cause of the problem before bringing in solutions.

Promoting the wrong person to a management position

An engineer was promoted to team lead, but was unable to handle the people side of the role. The manager took action by coaching the engineer to take a pure engineering path and taking on some of the team lead responsibilities. The manager learned to be more careful when promoting people to leadership positions, to trust their gut feeling, and to use internal resources to help managers validate their choice. If the person is not right for the job, it is better to let them go.

Achieving Team Scalability

The CTO of a startup was tasked with scaling from 2 developers to 10 in a year, which seemed impossible. He found a way to rebuild the product to make it easier for newcomers to enter, by cutting the product into two isolated parts and limiting its functionalities. This allowed developers to be onboarded in two weeks to a month, rather than three to six months. This experience taught the CTO that the way you build your product and structure your company can have a huge impact on scalability.

Process Improvement

When transitioning to a new company or leading a new team, it is important to consider alternatives and question whether the current process is the right one. There are a number of ways to improve processes, such as taking a pulse check on meetings and evolving processes as the company evolves. It is important to be transparent and communicate that process changes may not be perfect, but they will hopefully bring improvements. Improving processes is essential for a company to successfully scale and save time and money.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Team Collaboration Will Make a Customer Happy

The problem of ownership between two teams using different technologies was addressed by introducing a customer's perspective and reframing the discussion. Scrum was used to create better team dynamics and regular Scrum of Scrums meetings were proposed. QAs were invited to participate and organize group tests. The lesson learned was that ownership should focus on the product as a whole and all teams should be guided by customers' perspective. QAs were hesitant to join, but once they understood their role they were more eager to participate.