Our goal is to ship customer usable features every two week sprint, to create the tightest possible feedback loop. If a feature is ready sooner, great! Ship it!
We take inspiration from agile methods, but keep our minds (and souls) open to iterating on the workflow itself to create something which is just right for our team, product and clients.
A two week sprint will consist of the following meetings:
And of course a daily call to mostly see real human faces instead of a dark themed editor window, but also to ask questions and learn from each other. The traditional standup update can sometimes be a little jarring, we mix it up by making every standup a small demo session, because:
- Demos are more fun that listing off what one has done.
- It pushes us to build working code throughout the sprint.
Each session begins with a mind stretch and warmup, to get everyone's creative juices flowing and to remind ourselves, just what it is we exactly do at AirGrid. Fire up a FigJam board, and start throwing down terms, concepts and objects related to AirGrid.
The goal:
- Place yourself in the shoes of another department, if your an engineer think in a marketer's words.
- Learn from how other perceive the business, product and clients.
- Help cement and improve the ubiquitous language describing the platform.
Ok now everyone is suitably warm it is time to move onto metrics. We want everyone to be reminded of the north star metric as this is what should be driving our decision making during our planning meeting.
During this part of the session:
- Share the metrics with the team.
- Check if your metrics and north star are still relevant.
- Figure our which metrics need to be boosted and why.
- Keep our minds focused on linking our actions and metrics.
This is the meat of the meeting, a time for everyone to throw down ideas without fear or worries. This part does not need much structure or guidance, it will naturally occur for your team as you invest more time into planning and ideating together. A few good principles to keep the time optimally productive:
- Think about what you need to build to move the needle on the north star metric.
- List as many ideas as possible.
- Sort, filter and organise the ideas as you go.
- Do not get caught up in the technical details of any idea.
- Leave the scope flexible to allow for rapid delivery.
The product manager / owner will whittle down and spec out the ideas into something which can be built, tested, debugged, built again and most likely debugged once more in a single sprint. Not all ideas will be chosen, but they will all contribute to the overall direction of the next evolution of the platform.
The kick off meeting is a chance for the team to evaluate and dive into the technicalities of the requirements.
The goals of this meeting are:
- To split work between the team.
- Cross examine requirements in the tickets.
- Clarify any business logic.
- Raise any technical concerns.
- Discuss implementation and architecture.
- Agreeing on the testing & QA strategy.
- Ensure all work is captured in tickets.
After the smooth and on time delivery of new features, it is vital for the team to gather and share their work! This session also acts as a final sign off from both product and design, that the work meets the requirements.
The demos should also act as lubricant for ideas to start flowing for the following planning meeting.
The final step in this process is to launch, and then sit and watch those metrics sky rocket, as new users overload our servers with love for the work done.
To successfully launch it is vital to coordinate:
- Email to current and future users.
- Blog post on Medium and the AirGrid site.
- Tweet pointing to the blog.
- LinkedIn post also pointing to the blog and sign up flows.
After what was hopefully a smooth two weeks, with feature(s) shipped, we gather to reflect on what was good and bad. So again lets fire up a FigJam board and without fear throw down or thoughts. We create four quadrants, and use the sticky notes because they are cooler than regular text!
- What was good?
- What was bad?
- Ideas.
- Actions.
There is not much up keep this process requires, apart from keeping all of the created boards and ideas in a location close to your roadmap. It can be very helpful to review previous weeks work and ideas and inspect the evolution of concepts over time.
Thank you for making it this far in the guide, happy sprinting! 😀