Sprint Cadence

Focus On Inputs to Reduce Burnout

An engineering team was struggling with burn out due to too many requests coming in at once. The engineering leader took action by talking to the product team and stakeholders, and putting a "work in progress" limit in place. This reduced context switching and stress, and had the added benefit of the company making better business decisions. The lesson learned was that engineering leaders have a responsibility to make their entire team successful.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

Giving some visibility to performing junior engineers

At a company hackathon, junior engineers took the opportunity to work on an exciting project and ended up winning first prize. This hackathon was a great way for them to gain visibility and motivation in the organization, as it allowed them to try out new ideas and show off their skills. It also strengthened bonds between employees and fostered social cohesion.

Lessons From Setting Up an Insource Operations Offshore

This article discusses the experience of a CTO at a VC-backed SaaS company who attempted to accelerate their roadmap by offshoring their engineering team. Despite having the right people and culture in place, the team hired too quickly and did not have the right frameworks in place to make the arrangement successful. The cost savings were not realized and the output was significantly lower than expected. The takeaway is to start slowly when setting up an offshore location and to have a strong technical leader in place who understands the organization's culture and technical requirements.

Making Remote teams successful with Agile.

At Blackhawk Network, I managed a team of four engineers in California and five in India, who had to deal with significant time zone differences. To resolve this issue, I put together metrics, held two team sessions, and recommended that the team operate as one scrum team. The teams agreed to daily stand-ups, groomings, sprint planning, retrospectives, and sprint reviews, with the product manager in all meetings. This helped to reduce the 24-hour turnaround time, as there was frequent communication, and the product manager helped the team to understand the feature more accurately.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.