A Feature Teams Story
How to create an empowering environment for teams in order to achieve ambitious goals?
How did we make it happen?
Limitation
Teams owning software components
Idea
Pivoting towards feature teams
Challenge
How do multiple teams collaborate on a feature?
Future
Our experience showed us that evolution is an integral part of staying competitive
The limitation
Our teams used to own certain parts of the platform
A feature would be split by Product Owners & Architects into user stories according to each team’s components and then these components would be integrated. What we gained from having a well defined scope for teams, was diminished by having a limited context at team level and a problematic integration.
The idea
In order to overcome the limitation, our approach was to pivot towards feature teams. Now teams would tackle a feature end to end and Product Managers (the artists previously known as Product Owners) would coach & mentor Engineers to come up with their own solutions, rather than feeding them stories. If in the past Product Owners were too burdened with adjacent responsibilities within the team, the new Product Manager role meant a close relationship with the customer & the business.
Scrum plays an important role in the way we work and we add flavours as we see fit in order for it to better meet our needs.
At the same time we don't consider Scrum a one size fits all answer, as we have teams that are using a Kanban approach for instance.
Team structure
They are collaborating closely with our customers in order to have a complete picture of what they need and they make sure that we are building the right thing.
They code, they write automated tests, they test, they design architecture, they ponder scalability & performance and they give their input on the business. They are in charge of making sure that we are doing the right things the right way.
Scrum Masters have the mission of coaching teams throughout continuous effectiveness improvement, make sure that our activities go smoothly and work on improving the organizational system.
The challenges
All works well when one team works on a feature, but what happens when multiple teams collaborate together on one?
Here we had room to experiment a bit with scaling. After researching the frameworks out there we’ve chosen Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) due to the fact that it suited our culture well and because it provided a lightweight & transparent collaboration model.
Our variation on LeSS Huge resulted in something we call Feature Areas. The teams collaborating on the same feature use LeSS when it proves to be useful (and have common Sprint Reviews, Refinements, Plannings & Retrospectives besides the day-to-day collaboration).
Other challenges worth mentioning are: a difficulty in acquiring skills on unfamiliar components, distributing support amongst all teams & navigating through these important changes during the COVID remote context.
How we worked before
How we work now
The results
We managed to create focus on the team level for our initiatives
This led to building an entirely new product from scratch, developing a more stable & scalable solution by moving it server-side & releasing a long-awaited revamp.
Scrum teams became more engaged
They are empowered to design the solution starting from product discovery until it reaches the client.
The future
Our experience showed us that evolution is an integral part of staying competitive, so maybe if you ask us how we would work in a year or so it will be something different. But this is the nice part, embracing change as the only constant in the world, as the saying goes. With the aim of making customers, teams & managers happy. Definitely.
The people who are making it happen
