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• Founded in 2009 by Bernard Liautaud and
3 Centrale students
• ~270 employees in Paris, New York &
Lisbon (~120 in the Engineering team)
• Consumer product (B2C) + Enterprise offer
(B2B)
• 15 “Product & Engineering” teams

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3 5 10
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241
264
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2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

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• Feature flip
• Automated tests
• Estimation and planning
• Release dates communication
• Monitoring
• Documentation
• Go to market plan
• Dogfooding

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• Oral communication doesn’t
scale
• In a remote world, writing
things down is critical

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• Adapting the Software Development
Life Cycle to our reality
• Organizing a feature centric process
• Creating tools and guidelines to help
teams to improve predictability,
quality, and time to market

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• Confluence, what did you
expect?
• A template used for each
feature
• With lots of tips, tools and
guidelines
• Pointing to in depth-
ressources when needed

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• Build and share high level scope to get
feedback
• Phase projects in 2-3 sprints phases
• Describe elements that needs to be
modified
• Not final, can evolve

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• Getting feedback from stakeholders
before estimating
• Avoiding de-prioritizing a fully prepared project
• Get feedback from sales and marketing
• Getting early feedback from engineering
• Identify early on things that are technical not
possible

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• Ensure PMK is involved on day 1
• Why are we building this feature?
 Added value for the user
 Competitive advantage (product and technical)
• High-level marketing plan
 How do we want to talk about the feature?
 What marketing actions? (Email, Blog, etc.)
 What technical capabilities? (Deep link, feature flip,
etc.)
• Not final, can evolve

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• Identify missing
documentation and
training needs
• Organize and track
knowledge gap

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• Increase quality and speed by having consistent documentation
• Technical and product documentation regrouped in a dedicated
Confluence Space
• Templates to have consistent format and clear expectations
Scope, Specifications and Design

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• Needed when modifying the business
logic
• Increase quality by sharing kowledge
and being challenged on technical
choices
• Equivalent or Architecture Review for
the UI
• Feedback loop to review UI choices
 Eg. generic component versus
specific

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• Estimations are precise enough to
know if we are on track
• Only estimate what you know
 Complete specs and design
 Estimate only parts without unknowns
 Create phases for the unknowns
 If you don’t have a date, don’t share a date
 Sharing estimations outside of the
team is recommended

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• Based on estimation, plan the work
of the team
• Think about:
• Cooldown periods
• Hackathon
• Vacations
• Dependencies
• Potential hotfixes
• Rollout period
• Plan based on current staffing,
not future staffing

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• Dependencies should be
avoided: scrum teams must be
autonomous
• When not avoidable, have a clear
& documented agreement
• For big dependencies, build a
way to follow progress versus
plan

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• Use release ranges to have ambitious goals
but realistic goals
• Best and conservative cases
• Have ranges for Code Freeze and End of the
Feature Rollout
 Release is ambiguous: code release? Feature
release? Start or end of the rollout?
• Don’ts
 Don’t use “worst case”
 Don’t use “current estimate”

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Jan Feb March April May June
Team
On the horizon
To be scoped and estimated
Work in process
Releases ranges
01/29
01/22 02/05
Release ranges with best & conservative release dates
Confidence: green High, medium Orange
01/29 02/12
02/19 03/19
02/19 03/19
01/15
04/16 05/14
04/16 05/14
03/05 04/02
Team 02/05
01/22
02/05 03/05
02/19
02/05
04/02 06/11
03/05 04/02
Today
04/02 05/14
04/16 05/28
Accomplished/delivered to date
05/28 06/25
04/02 04/30
02/19 03/19
Feature name
Feature name
Feature name
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team

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0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Feature 1 Feature 2 Feature 3 Feature 4 Feature 5 Feature 6 Feature 7 Feature 8 Feature 9 Feature 10
Delivery - Actual versus estimates (weeks)
Sooner than best case Sooner than conservative case Later than Conservative case

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• Use feature flips when possible
to secure the release train
• Keep the feature flip code for 6
weeks
• Decreases the number of hotfixes
• Share knowledge with new
comers
“Also wanted to mention that I've found the info on
archiving feature flips in the FDC page to be really
good, it literally made my day yesterday. ”

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• Automation in Teams: Teams
implement the Happy Path
Automated Test
• Happy Path is the nominal
scenario of usage for a feature
• This needs to be accounted for
during estimation
• Identify lacking guidelines

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• We recommend having
dogfooding as much as
possible, even for small/non-
critical features
• Teams can communicate in
slack in #general
• Confluence template to gather
company’s feedback

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• Final Go-To-Market Plan
• Communicate back to the team

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• Specs to add logs and monitor
the usage of the features
• Defining the feature rollout
monitoring: technical logs,
dashboards,…

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• We recommend teams to step back and
share learnings after finishing a feature
• Learning loop across teams:
 What did we do well?
 What will we do differently going forward?
 What would have allowed the team to be
more efficient? (think about both internal
and external topics)

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• Too much bureaucracy?
 Minimum Viable Bureaucracy is not 0 bureaucracy
 Test, learn, adapt
• Using ranges will decrease the sense of urgency?
 Is there any incentive to finish sooner than the Best Case?
 Estimations have helped identifying opportunity to improve speed and time to
market
• Not lean enough?
 This can prevent a team to develop quickly a simple feature
 Following FDC can transform a 1 week feature in a 2 weeks feature
 1 additional week for good documentation, feature flip, and automated tests,
seems worth it in most cases
 Guidelines versus rules: teams can decide not to follow guidelines

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• Better integration of sales, marketing
and user support
• Work more on Speed
• Experiment and adapt guidelines to:
 Small features
 Discovery teams
 R&D teams

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• Present as an experiment, and get
feedback
• Avoid blocking steps – use quality tools,
not quality gates
• Find champions within team and
departments
• Start small, then expand
 Topics
 Teams
• Show results

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• We need teams to be autonomous and
creative, not blocked within a process
• Create tools, not templates
• Let teams experiment outside of the
guidelines
 But let’s not fail twice on the same
issue