Daniel's Blog
Culture, ship it!
3 min read | Last Updated: April 30, 2021
This week I had a Ways of Working session with one of my squads, and the team proposed to change the process in a big way.
To give some context, all teams work in two-week sprints, starting and finishing on Wednesday. Additionally, the last sprint of the quarter is called the innovation sprint - the team has time to fix tech debt, learning or experiment/do new issues to improve the company. Innovation sprints are awesome, and some “innovation” ideas have made it into production.
I digress; I mentioned that I thought everyone on the team could spend some time every week learning when a couple of colleagues proposed if we could have innovation Fridays instead of the last sprint.
That’s a big change.
Everyone does innovation for the last sprint, and we have been doing so for more than two years. For those of you counting, the innovation sprint is the sixth sprint of the quarter, so doing it Friday after lunch should be about the same.
The team is excited, passionate and entirely on board with it. I honestly thought we could not change that, but I already said the team could decide on anything (except for the two-week sprints and start-end on Wednesdays), so I promised to talk to Lucas (that’s the CTO) on the next day.
I asked him on the following day, and not only he was OK with it, but he also reminded me that the team decides and if I and the product lead are happy, he’s happy. Done.
So I tell the team, and they are very excited (lots of emojis!). Also, because we are in the middle of the quarter, we will be doing full-day innovation Fridays for the remainder of the quarter. They are already brainstorming ideas on what to do next Friday, awesome.
One day for the team proposing a major process change until it’s done. Not bad, right?
As easy as it sounds?
It was very easy, but there’s some groundwork already that happened over time. The team feels safe enough to come up with ideas that may seem impossible or disruptive and believe they are achievable. They also trust me enough to execute them, or they would not have brought it up. The team is a safe space.
I don’t code as much as I did before, but at least I can still ship it :)
Written by Daniel Lopez Rovira who likes talking about engineering stuff.