This document summarizes a discussion between Asana and AWS on collaboration to accelerate time to market. Key points include: 1) Coordination takes up most work time but provides the least value; work management tools are needed to improve efficiency. 2) AWS transformed to microservices and two-pizza teams to enable agility; Asana uses a double diamond process for innovation. 3) Clear documentation, automated procedures, and feedback loops improve cross-team alignment. 4) Defining roles and responsibilities like tech leads helps scale collaboration and allows fast, sustainable delivery.

1. Accelerate Time to Market:
AWS and Asana Talk Collaboration
August 12, 2020
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2. Speakers
Eric Pelz
Engineering Tech Lead
Asana
Aditya Muppavarapu
Global Segment Leader for DevOps
AWS

3. Collaboration in 2020
Agenda
01.
02.
03.
04.
05.
Transforming DevOps to enable agility
Improving cross-team alignment
Designing DevOps roles that scale
Live Q&A

4. Collaboration in 2020

5. Delivering on
time has become
more difficult
● Distributed work
● Rapidly changing
business priorities
● Work-life balance

6. Strategy
13%
Coordination
of work
60%
Skilled work
27%
Time spent
at work
Source: 1
Asana Anatomy of Work Index 2019
Coordination is
dominating our time is spent on skilled work
and strategy1
Only 40%
state that their team isn’t
as efficient as it could be
83%
are clear on how their
work ladders into
company objectives
Only 46%
of meetings are
deemed unnecessary
66%

7. Coordination
Work management
Content Business tools
Product &
development
ReportingCommunication
and more and moreand moreand moreand more
Work management is the missing
piece in many tech stacks

8. Transforming DevOps
to enable agility

9. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Amazon Way

10. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
To maintain competitive advantage,
digital businesses must innovate as rapidly as possible
FeedbackIdeas
Experiment
Innovation
Flywheel

11. Asana’s Double Diamond Process

12. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

13. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
2001
Development transformation at Amazon: 2001-2002
2002
monolithic
application + teams
microservices + 2 pizza teams

14. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Breaking things down
Principles
• Make units a small as possible (Primitives)
• Create Data Domains
• De-couple based on scaling factors,
not functions
• Each service operates independently
• APIs (contracts) between services

15. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
“Two-pizza” teams
• Own a service
• Minimizes social constraints
(Conway’s law)
• Autonomy to make decisions
Getting (re)organized

16. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Own everything
• Planning
• Security
• Performance
• Scalability
• Deployment
• Operation
• Bugs
• Documentation
• Testing…
Getting (re)organized
How can one team do all of this?

17. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Developers Services
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
Delivery pipelines
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
MonitorReleaseTestBuild
Microservices delivery lifecycle

18. Improving cross-team alignment

19. Templatize successful deployment and testing patterns
Plan to turn on the experiment to 10% before doing 50%
Consider requesting external QA
Performance Considerations (see description)
Did you coordinate with the on-call engineers for your launch?
International / Languages
Process
Features to check
Browser support: Firefox & Chrome & Safari & Edge
Data export (CSV, JSON, iCal, ...)
Limits for large amounts of data
Keyboard shortcuts
User Type: Guests & Admins Low Waiting
Done
In Prog
High
High
Medium
High
Done
Done
Add Task Priority Status Task Progress
High
Medium
Medium
High
High
Done
In Prog
Waiting
Done
In Prog
Project Planning Checklist

20. Document and
automate
procedures
Establish clear
rules in your
project process
Document
procedures (SLAs,
who will triage,
alerting, etc.)
Automate
procedures where
possible
Create new Rule for Bug Tracking

21. Collaboration is not just technical.
It’s the cultural willingness to share
and win as a team using the right
technologies and the assumption
that everyone can add value.
— Wayne Kurtzman, Research Director, IDC

22. Tips for effective
cross-team
collaboration
Align on the problem
and stakeholders
Employ the
partnership model
for approvals
Establish a real-time
feedback loop

23. Designing DevOps roles that scale

24. Tech Lead Training and Support
Process
Establish clear areas of responsibility (AoRs)
Eric PelzAssignee
Primary (>20 hr/wk)
Core responsibility
Responsibility
Effort
Relationship
Description Scope of Responsibility
•Ensure that new TLs are set up for success with the right support and mentorship
(Eng TL Mentor Responsibilities)
•Maintains TL guidance and documentation, including how TLs relate to other roles in a team
(PM, Eng Manager)
•Ensure that all TLs have support structure, community, and can continue to grow
•Ensures that aspiring TLs have support and resources: to understand the role, why they
might want to do it, and steps to start towards it.
Parent AoR
Eng Lead
Stakeholders
Product Eng Lead
Adoption Pillar Lead, Eng
Clarity Pillar Lead Eng
Workflow Pillar Lead, Eng
Infra Pillar Eng Lead
Name
Owner
Defined scope of
responsibilities
Related AoRs
Who is involved

25. Management
Executives
Team leads
Employees
Mission
Objectives
Portfolios
Tasks
Projects and
processes
Design roles
to enable
cross-team
collaboration
As Pillar Tech Lead,
Eric ensures technical
systems and supporting
processes enable
multiple program teams
to ship fast sustainably

26. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
> 190 million deployments a year*
Thousands of teams
× Microservice architecture
× Continuous delivery
× Multiple environments
*2019 data

27. Takeaways
Communication =/= Coordination →
Action requires accountability
Rapid innovation requires the right tooling
and team transformation → cultural
willingness to share and win as a team
Clearly defined areas of responsibility
help teams ship fast sustainably

28. Questions?
Submit them via chat

29. Thank you!
Learn more:
asana.com/uses/agile-management