1.
What we’ve learned about learning
Agile Welly
November 2014
Brian Bannister & Andy Newport

2.
Brian Bannister
@nz_brian
brian@powershop.co.nz
Andy Newport
@newportandy
andy.newport@powershop.co.nz

3.
What are we talking about?
How we’ve grown the Powershop delivery team, when we
never have enough people who know anything:
Growth
Integration
Learning culture

4.
Small start - January 2013
10 Developers
Culture shock
Complex business domain
Hard - morale
Hard - build up the junior members
Hard - integrate and make it fun

5.
Struggle - January to May 2013
Separate development team
Learn - similar cultures can be very different
Hard - need to grow
Hard - lots of people were remote
Hard - Scrumbanish

6.
Scrumbanish
Sprint board with features that moved through:
–Backlog -> Dev -> Test -> Release
No need to complete
1 week sprints
Really just catch-ups
Worked for 5 people, not 10

7.
Test - May to September 2013
Sit together
Teach and learn
Easy - dev team support
Hard - testers sit with business
Learn - testers = SMEs

8.
Team leads - May to July 2013
No teams!
Technical leaders
Still Scrumbanish
Fear of silos
Hard - large meetings
Hard - right people
Hard - what’s the role?

9.
Teams - August 2013 to April 2014
Better Scrum needs smaller teams!
Hard - business buy in
Learn - great for priority management
Learn - sprint goals are expected, not rewarded
Learn - team leaders are multipliers
Learn - silos (aka teams) enable teaching

10.
Lots of change - April 2014
Hard - fast growth, but we need more
Learn - no-one has the skills
Learn - smart, passionate
Learn - <3 teams

11.
Growth - April to November 2014
A lot of growth
More to come
We’re used to it now
Developers at Powershop

12.
Integration - April to June 2014
Goodbye dungeon
Learn - sit together, share culture
Hello today’s Powershop
Learn - sometimes you need to force change

13.
Dev Managers - April 2014
Learn - we have amazing staff
Drive engagement
Teach and nurture
– Staff and community
Technical and line
Manage the SDLC - information vs decisions

14.
Dev Train - April 2014
Starting point for all new developers
Teach Ruby
Enforce elegance
Set culture
1 to 4 months
Learn - attractor
Learn - clear signal of values
Efficient!

15.
We needed another team
We did this
It worked OK
Learn - some people were scared
Learn - some people like change
Learn - customers don’t like it

16.
Lean UX - June 2014
Pretty excited
More visible UX process
Added a UX researcher
Maybe more to come?
Learn - integration isn’t solved by an idea

17.
Tell us your problems
Find the right solution
Stops waste
Drives engagement
Hard - business buy in
Learn - feels slower
Learn - some people just want a task

18.
Now - November 2014
45 people in dev / test / design / PO + 6 interns
Total focus on teaching and learning
Growing quickly, but feels normal
Teams are engaged - they complain about it!
A culture of respect in an irreverent company
It’s fun and the kind of company we want to
work for

19.
What’s left?
More integration
SDLC process
Need more:
–Developers
–Product Owners
–Interaction Designers
–UX Experts

20.
Key take-aways
Reasons people want to work with us:
–Learning culture
–Training team
–High performance
–Elegance
–Diversity
Silos are good

21.
Questions?

22.
Brian Bannister @nz_brian
brian@powershop.co.nz
Andy Newport @newportandy
andy.newport@powershop.co.nz
Contact Us