This document outlines an engineering culture and mission from Sumerge. It discusses establishing self-organizing teams that share a common mission and make decisions collectively. The culture emphasizes innovation from all team members through empowerment and experimentation. It stresses ensuring tasks are completed well by focusing on product excellence, ease of planning/delivery, and ease of release. Measuring these cultural principles and providing feedback is important for continuous improvement. The goal is building great software through great engineering practices and a focus on people.

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SUMERGE
ENGINEERING CULTURE
“High Performing Teams”

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What is an engineering culture?

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What is Sumerge’s Engineering
mission?

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Our mission is to build great software
in great ways

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Stable Innovative
User
Experience
Business
value
Customer
delight
Our mission is to build great software
in great ways

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Stable Innovative
User
Experience
Tools Technologies
Methods &
processes
Team
collaborationArchitecture
Business
value
Customer
delight
Our mission is to build great software
in great ways

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How should we reach this mission?

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Our culture is about these core principles
Self Organizing Teams
Innovation from All Team Members
Empower and Experiment
Things Get Done Well
The People
1
2
3
4
5

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SELF ORGANIZING TEAM

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What is a Self Organizing Team?
A group of individuals or a team, who work together toward a
common goal, have the ability and authority to take decisions,
readily adapt to changing demands, learn and improve.

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Our Key Areas for a Self Organizing Team
Team Mission
Decision
Making
Dependability

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Self Organizing Team
> Team Mission
• Do we have a shared mission that everyone in the team understands?
• Do we all understand the business and technical solution we are
building?
• Do we understand what will delight the customer?
• Do we all know the plan and how will we reach it?
A common mission that is shared & understood across the team

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• All decisions should be taken collectively between the team
• No command & control from anyone in the team
• No personal ego – we listen to ideas from everyone and choose
what’s best for the team’s mission
Who makes the decisions in the team? Who makes the technical
decisions? Who sets the delivery dates and customer
commitments? Who assigns tasks?
Self Organizing Team
> Decision Making

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Whether you are Junior or Senior…(Everyone)
We expect that you say your opinion, its fine that you turn out wrong, its fine
to admit it, its fine to say I don’t know, its fine to say I need to research and get
back to you…
Self Organizing Team
>Decision Making

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• We have healthy technical discussions…with one objective in mind,
the project’s mission!
• We take opinions from inside and outside of the team…we reach a
“team decision” even if not everyone is convinced at the end…and its
fine that after a while we discover that this wasn’t the best decision
and we revisit it.
• We don’t allow blame games or tolerate it
What if we have conflicts and different opinions?
Self Organizing Team
> Decision Making

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This doesn’t mean we don’t have a team structure…
we do have project managers, scrum masters, analysts, product
owners, software engineers, quality engineers…etc. each with their
area of responsibility
we work together from the different perspectives to make sure that we
take the best decisions for the project’s mission
Self Organizing Team
> Team Structure

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• If this is the case, then you are not self organizing and you need to
work on sharing the vision, mission, plan, knowledge and ownership
across the team
• We understand that you will have SME in some areas but if this is the
case the team should work together to see how to mitigate this risk
Do we have bottlenecks in the team?
Do we have high dependability on one person in the team?
Does the work gets affected if one person doesn’t show up?
Self Organizing Team
> Dependability

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INNOVATION

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Innovation
• What’s new you are bringing to the table
• Business problems and features
• Technology
• Methods
• Tools
Innovation is expected from everyone in the team

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EMPOWER & EXPERIMENT

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Empower and Experiment
• To take decisions
• To try new things
• To innovate
• To take calculated risk
• And to fail trying
No one ever gets things done 100% right from the first time…so its
fine to try, learn and improve.
You are Empowered;

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THINGS GET DONE…

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Things get done well
Regardless of the technology, architecture, process and tools you are using since
these topics always change over time and we will always try new things and
improve…
But you should always assess the following…
Product Excellence
Ease of Planning &
Delivering
Ease of Release

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• Is the customer delighted with the features that we are building and
shipping?
• How is the technical excellence of the product?
• How is the product architecture? Is it simple, clear and understood by
the team? Is it modular enough? right level of abstraction? Robust?
Responsive to change?
• How is the code quality? Technical debt? Sufficient Documentation?
• How easy it is to implement new features and change existing ones?
Business & technical excellence of the product
Things Get Done Well
> Product Excellence

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• Does the team understands the projects delivery process?
• Is the team able to plan, deliver and meet their commitments with
good quality with minimum hassle?
• Is the team productive and efficient in getting actual work done? Or
do we have time waste and under utilization?
We are able to plan and meet our plans
Things Get Done Well
> Ease of Planning & Delivering

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• How is our release process?
• Are we able to deliver new features and releases to the customer for
production with minimum hassle?
• Is our release process solid and consistent?
• Are we able to rollback easily incase of failures?
• How is the automation level of our delivery pipeline (CI/CD)? The
maturity and ease of our commit to production flow?
Things Get Done Well
> Ease of Release

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THE PEOPLE

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The People
• Good teamwork
• Respect
• No ego, no heroes, its about the
team’s success
• Knowledge sharing
• Open environment for ideas and
feedbacks
• Continuous improvement
• Passion
• Continuous learning and
development
• Sumerge culture and values over
knowledge and skills
Team Individual

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Our culture is about these core principles
1. Self organizing teams
• Mission
• Decision making
• Dependability
2. Innovation
3. Empower and Experiment
4. Things get done well
• Product Excellence
• Ease planning & delivering
• Ease of release
5. The People

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How do we measure it and improve?

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How do we measure it and improve
was now was now was now was now
Self organizing teams
Mission 1 4 1 4 1 4 1 4
Decision making 1 3 1 5 1 3 5 2
Dependability 3 2 3 3 3 2 3 2
Innovation 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 1
Empower and Experiment 2 4 2 4 2 4 2 4
Things get done well
Product Excellence 2 5 2 5 2 5 2 5
Ease planning & delivering 2 5 2 5 2 5 2 5
Ease of release 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1
The People 2 1 2 1 2 1 4 5
Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 Team 4

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Feedback & Questions

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Thank you