In this video, I discover that our team is the only one in the room NOT doing daily standups!
Seriously, Richard explains the disciplines they use in a remote WFH world (Melbourne was locked down hard, hard, hard at the time of recording). So we discuss some of the challenges they have in executing on the OKRs.
You can get this on Soundcloud or see all our podcast links here.
The summary is:
- Airwallex form “squads” that are spear-headed with Product Manager, Designer and Lead Engineer
- There is an over-arching SME strategy.
- Quarterly and Annual OKRs trickle down through the organisation.
- opportunity decision trees (Teresa Torres, see Opportunity Solution Trees for Product Teams to ideate potential solutions to OKRs”
- Triaging of solutions (see Don’t build shiny objects)
- Monday planning meetings – where broader goals for the week within sprints are agreed
- Daily standups (!)
https://vimeo.com/467215775
Transcript
David: but what’s what’s your approach today: how does onesquad really work? What’s thewhat’s the way you attack things? Is it okrs? Is it JTBD? (“jobs to be done”). How do you get things into sprints etc Richard: OK, so in terms of how we make decisions and work.So quarterly OKRs are used to govern essentially the outcomes that the team is shooting towards. Those OKRs ladder to our to our SME strategy so we’ve got our SME strategy.We start with. We then develop OKRs on a quarterly basis and an annual basis thatstrategy and then what the team does is identifies the opportunities they think are best placed to move those OKRs and essentially that then eventually translates to a bunch features they (the squad) want to deliverwe then run a a fortnightly uma fortnite cadence which is essentiallyaboutwhich includes a bunch of rituals aplanning meetinga showcase it’s got uh some weeklyplanningto segment that up and and dailystand-upsokay so just ritual is that a productproduct word or is that an air will xword or is that a secretjust a ritualit’s a rich word is it maybe it’s a richword but we have these yeah we have aset of meetings that essentiallyderive that fortnightly cadence and thatfortnightly cadenceessentially when you put a bunch ofthose together um they’re constantlytrying to make progress towardsthose outcomes those akr’s that we’dagreed at the start of the quarterright right okay all right and is thereis there one of those particular ritualsthat actually really matters a lot morethan the others like which is thewhich is the one that you must keep ormust not miss orum in terms of the ones that arecritical look ii’m a really big fan ofstand up i think stand-up’s reallycritical to have that daily check-inand as part of that trying to ensurethat the team is consistentlyfocusing on the outcomes that we’retrying to deliver it’s very very easy tomy my view is that if you if you’re notdisciplined around stand upit’s very very easy to kind of graduallyveer off the path over the course of afortnight andyou have a goal at the start of thatfortnightlyum tayden so you’re like at the start ofthe fortnight you outline a goal this iswhere we want to get to in two weekstimeif you’re not reinforcing that on aday-by-day basisbasis it’s very easy to get to the endof the fortnight i’ll look back and gobooks uh i’m not where i wanted to gohow do i end up hereso i think when i you knowso much of what is done in productdevelopment is it’s about collaborationand communication and so much of itabout is just reinforcing the samemessage all the time and we can get intothis in terms ofsome of the lessons that i’ve learnedover my career but it’s very very easyforteams to veer off the path away fromoutcomes towards outputit’s very easy to veer off the path ofexperimentation uncertainty and tryingto nail down something that is certainwhich isin many cases look at this shiny thingthat i’ve builtand so trying to embed that into yourday-to-dayum check-in with the team i thinkand so we’re doing we’re doing tuesdaysand thursdays for stand-up for stand-upsyou know our team our team’s about nineandand so tuesdays and thursday afternoonswe make sure we time it so that theoffshores cancan can be involved as well too we usedto and this is areally interesting transition from acovert perspective was thatwe used to get together in a physicalspace and talk about things andjust by default we would exclude peoplethat weren’t in the time zoneand it was really bad it was reallyculturally bad to do thatso we fixed that just by us being allremoteand you know it’s improved communitycommunication a lot but tuesdays andthursdays are you saying that you’redoing every daywe do every day far out okay yeah and onon mondayon monday we plan and that includes atthe end of the planning it’s like righthang on where are all the tickets whereare we atbut then uh tuesdays to fridays there’sa stand up every dayand this would you know that that’si’ve i think i don’t think i’ve everworked in a teamthat hasn’t had a stand up every dayright so we’re lazy we should be ashameddeeplyi don’t know whether i mean we mighthave it wrong right like this who’sdoing daily stand-ups hereeverybody but me okaythat’s it team’s in troublebut uh you know so that’s that’s anessential discipline for you in thatsituation do you find people now thatyou know remote that people are kind ofdrifting off and maybe they’re justworking on something else while they’relistening to the other people talk howdo you how do you actually make surethat’s a great that’s a that’s that is aum that’s a major risk and and what youknow what people can do is they can putthe screen that they want to work on infront of the camera and be looking atthe camerawhile apparently looking at a camera anddoing work right and doing other stuffthat that’s a that’s a key issue youknow how do you get around that the onlyway to get around it is teams reallybought into the outcome they’re tryingto deliverum and where the team’s going aheadbecause when they are bored in they aregoing to be paying attention becausethey know thatum paying attention in that moment isreally important togetting you know helping the teamachieve what they want solike i think in some respectspeople’s engagement in meetings in avirtual in a virtual worldis a really good gauge of the level ofengagement your team has withwith you generally um i mean i don’tknowit’d be great if there was some way imean it’s a little bit creepy andyou know it’s invading privacy but insome respects you could actually seewhat people were doing on their screensduring meetings in a virtual environmentyou’ve got a nice measure of facebookyeah yeah it’s interesting thatsomebody’s going to solve this sort ofremoteyou know body language thing as a way ofunderstanding itit’ll probably be a snapchat a snapchatfilter or something like thatthat’ll do it