Thread by @a_bangser

Opening the day at #FlowCon with @maaretp's 400th talk ever (🤯) speaking about her experience from prescribed "agile" to being socially banned from the to confidence in her teams way of working regardless of terms.

1.5 million customers and an 11 person team handles _all_ the support cases?! Wow.

The "machine" of feature developed to monitored in prod has hundreds of thousands of tests and has been refined for years.

@maaretp #FlowCon

Three main drivers of this happiness as a team?
- release frequency (once a change is made, it will be out quickly)
- sense of ownership (no hierarchy deciding what is right to work on for cust happiness)
- learning (a common curiosity & drive to move forward)

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Comparing a pool to a bath tub. You don't just scale a bath tub up. Pools have guards (and friends around 😂).

But they are both containers of water.

So just like releases every day vs once a month...are both releases, there are key differerences.

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This image from @paul_hammant showcases some of those changes from quarterly releases to releases 100x a day.

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I love it. "The good place", "the soulsucking place" and the "insane asylum" all in one company just highly correlated to:
- release cycle
- attitude to quality
- delivery practices
- maintenance of issues
- dealing with uncertainty

@maaretp #FlowCon

So @maaretp's team has built their own practices for their own "good place"

- continuous delivery
- less reliance on jira
- time spent on delivery not estimates
- devs empowered to own PO activities
- no projects
- no scrum, 1 week cycles...too slow!

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When @maaretp read an article by @JoshuaKerievsky about customer obsessed teams not having POs she was curious. Her team had a PO and that did mean people shared with them instead of each other.

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Possibly counterintuitively, by moving the PO to another spot, @maaretp and team started share w/each other rather than just PO. And while PO was very responsive, they were still a bottleneck on decisions for what to work on.

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The team realised that some ideas required a leap of faith and doing more analysis wouldn't help make a more accurate decision.

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This move to PO activities to the team instead of a role was intimidating to both PO and team. But an experiment helped:

Put the team directly in touch with the customers

Previous PO goes to existing meetings (full week effort!) and bring ideas to the team. O

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Over 3 months, the team retried that not much changed.

But actually everything changed.

Delivered more, and more valuable work because the team was able to directly support sales and customers.

And that PO at meetings? No useful ideas came from all those!

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Fixing bugs became the norm. What used to be hundreds in the backlog became zero. Now the team has a rule of prioritising bugs if the count ever hits 20.

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Devs started owning all 3 stacks for their product. This was JS, C++, python and not even always within their teams control.

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By being empowered the team was empowered to make experiments/changes in a process optimised for flow.

And then bringing real customers to the team (and the team to real customers) was huge win for both customers and team.

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When the team had both power and responsibility over the product, they immediately realised the power of telemetry and had the ability to add it as a priority!

(Ed: come to my talk next in 2.04 to hear my story of doing this 🤗)

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What does this all sum up to? If you don't change anything, nothing can get better.

The current working practices in @maaretp's team may not be for you, but their journey to learn what worked for them is the key thing to learn from.

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Even though the team was happy at times with how things were going, they always pushed forward for even more happiness.

Even as 100%, if you push for 1% improvement every day, you have the change to improve 37.8%!

Math:
1.00 ^365 = 1
1.01 ^365 = 37.8

@maaretp #FlowCon

Living the dream...a developer centric way of working where developers are trusted (and empowered) to make decisions _and mistakes_, they are able to have huge impact. The cost of minimising number of mistakes can grind the progress of a team to a halt.

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A key principle and culture is internal open source. It is not only ok, but encouraged to discuss changes and open pull requests on code bases you aren't a main contributor of.

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Interesting idea...the reason some people may not share with you is that they do not want to overwhelm you. But you are always able to pull information from them. This was particularly true when onboarding new team members.

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"if you begin to think about daring, it is best to just dare."

(Ed: This fits very well with @lunivore Capability Red / estimating lizkeogh.com/2013/07/21/est…)

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And for talk number 400 @maaretp gets a well deserved standing ovation! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

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