Sprint Cadence

Shipping Products Faster with Confidence

Many companies struggle to find a product-market fit, but often fail to realize that shipping features faster is key to receiving feedback and building something relevant. To move faster with confidence, engineers need to assess the full lifecycle of building features, identify potential bottlenecks, and invest in automated testing. Lessons learned include measuring, understanding customer usage, and making the testing experience great for developers.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Getting Team Buy-in To Improve

When starting as a new manager of an existing team, it is important to take a step back and observe the team from both the inside and outside. After collecting feedback, involve the team in decision making and brainstorming solutions. This approach was successful for the new manager at Atlassian, who was able to reorganize the team's planning process and create a healthy team environment.

Introducing Engineering Design

The team was struggling to meet goals due to feedback coming too late in the development cycle. To address this, the manager introduced a new step in the process - engineering design - to provide feedback before any code was written. This was met with skepticism, but ultimately resulted in increased velocity, better code quality, improved morale, and better collaboration. The manager learned to be attentive to the team's complaints and to approach problems creatively.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

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.