Sponsor: Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer
Mission: Within 6 months, build a software engineering tribe and launch an app
Hats worn: Manager, Mobile engineering & strategy; interim Product Owner and User Experience Designer; interim Manager for a 2nd Mobility team.
My journey as a leader was not always smooth and was not supposed to. As an emerging leader, I learned to lean on instinct and regular reflection. I learned along the way to structure my reflections, tune in my gut feeling and approach leadership as a fluid process. Here are a couple of my applied guidelines when building a new team and practice.
“You’re nothing without your team”
LEADING THROUGH CULTURE
AN INSPIRING MISSION
“Building the best insurance app in the world” does not sound like a motivating mission. What makes a good mission are the shared values, wrapped in a metaphor that reverberates with engineers and creators.
As a leader, you lean in, listen, observe and see what makes the group tick, what is the common language, what are the shared values. Only then a leader is ready to guide the team to write its own success story.
And we found that common metaphor in the Star Wars Universe.
BB-8 is a Star Wars robot, known for its loyalty, proactive assistance and packed with some cool tech.
💡See Google’s guide set for setting up a strong team vision
A STRONG TEAM IDENTITY
In a large organizational structure, it is instrumental for a team to have a strong team identity. “Being a family” feeling is what fosters cooperative behaviors, and high team performance. The familiar feeling of belonging to a group creates spaces of trust, where individuals are encouraged to share, create and fail together.
As a team, we leaned in on our Star Wars universe metaphor and we became known as Rogue 1:
brave, as the Spaceship pilots*,
masterly, as the Jedis*,
caring, as the Resistance*
We eventually scaled to a second development team and we were able to scale up also our identity and culture to a Rogue 2 crew.
Team logos
* Star Wars references
💡White paper: How Organizational Identity Affects Team Functioning: The Identity Instrumentality Hypothesis by Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus
UNITING RITUALS
For example the whole team going to grab a coffee every Wednesday morning. Or at the end of each sprint, the team votes who was the Most Valuable Player that sprint. Or something a bit larger as quarterly offsites.
The rituals are different from the process meetings that are part of the working cycle: demos, planning sessions, retrospectives, daily standups and so on.
Mobile Development tribe rituals:
Quarterly day off-sites
End of Year Award Ceremonies: The Mobi Awards
“Ring the bell” when a sprint story is finished
Rotating “Push the Launch button” (when launching a new version of the app)
Team offsite in May 2018
💡PAPER: “Ritual Design: crafting team rituals for meaningful organizational change”, F. Kurzat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan of the Ritual Design Lab
LEADING SHOULDER TO SHOULDER
SUSTAINABLE INCLUSIVE PROCESS
As a foundation for a sustainable process, we looked into implementing a process that empowers all contributors to ownership.
We picked up a common framework: Agile as a base process and work practices and we extend to a triple tier process: Discovery, Design, Development. Each tier had a different owner responsible for the outcome.
How do you lead a cross-functional team of product development that is a Strategy team, a Design team, and an engineering team at once?
It is a given to say, that developing impactful products does not happen all at once. The creation process from defining the problem to launching a solution is a step by step journey, with multiple passengers.
Triple tier product delivery process, and respective tier owners
💡ARTICLE: Dave Malouf’s Triple Agile Track & Design Ops
CONSISTENT TOOLSETS
From the get-go, we focused on adopting inclusive and diverse toolsets. We implemented lean documentation methods and build our research and design repositories. The structure implemented allowed us to accelerate development and reduce maintenance costs and efforts.
EMPOWERING RESPONSIBILITIES
“I am the only person in the team that does not build anything”
Every team member is instrumental to the success of the team. But perceptions can be otherwise. That was the case with J., a quality analyst in the Mobile team. His perception of his work and his role was a barrier for him to actively participate in the other stages of the project. And the team and product were missing out, as J. had great ideas, understood the app and its ecosystem of features better than anyone.
To empower him, we change his title from Quality Analyst to a title that reflects not what he does but what value he brings to the team. J. and all the Quality Analysts became The Guardians of Quality. We also redefined the responsibilities to include product ownership of the defects backlog and ultimate Go / No Go for product launches.
LEADING WITH A STRONG POINT OF VIEW
COMPELLING DIRECTION
“In 500m change to the right lane, and then turn right”. This is not the type of direction you want to give as a leader. What you want to set is a destination. A strong team with a strong structure and mature practice will self organize to arrive at the destination.
Depending on the project or mandate giving the destination can take different forms. The example if from Yearly Mobility Objectives.
INCLUSIVE PLANNING
One of my favorite activities is to build together, as a team, the product map. It is an activity we do at the beginning of the year and midway. Several ingredients go into a Roadmap:
The strategic direction of the product
Tactical strategy (the quick wins)
User problems we want to solve
What do we want to learn and explore to gain new skills and knowledge
Once we have all the ingredients we create our Roadmap and prioritise the value and impact we want to deliver.
The photo is from a planning session from 2019.
SHARING THE SPACE
In cross-functional teams, it is easy to stumble across communication friction. Each expert has it’s own vocabulary and cares for different metrics of success. Even more, each person has a different communication style, preference for how to receive feedback and so on.
A leader's role is to create a space where all voices are heard and understood. I use an array of exercises to align the team towards a shared mindset, help others develop soft skills, and foster common understanding.
One of my favorite exercises to improve team communication is “My user manual”.
First team photo March 2017
Offsite photo March 2018
The presented work is a result of a group of talented people that I have been part of. I will happily grab a coffee with you and share more details about my work and contribution.
