How we work at Appear Here during the pandemic (Software Engineer)
Early in 2019 my colleague, Inês, wrote about what it was like to work at Appear Here as a product designer. A lot has changed since January 2019, little did we know that just over a year later we would be hit by a global pandemic and national lockdowns. Taking inspiration from Inês’ blog post, I decided it would be a good time to write about my experience as a software engineer, specifically about how we now work during the lockdowns, and how things have changed in three years that I have been working at Appear Here (and it has been an amazing three years).
Before diving into how we work at present under lockdown, I will briefly go over some of the team’s ‘battle rhythms’ we had before.
Daily Stand Ups
Every morning, typically at 09:30 we would all have gathered in the company’s board room for a daily stand up, going over our progress on each of our stretch goals, what we did the day before, and what we intend to do that day. We would then go over our Kanban board on Jira, and make sure there are no blocked tickets. This would typically take about 10 minutes.
At the beginning of the week we also have a weekly kick off, where we would go over the previous week’s stretch goals, and whether we hit them or not. We would then be assigned a new stretch goal for the week. The beginning of week stand up was also a great chance to go over the cycle time of the Kanban board, typically we focus on numbers like how long tickets stay in peer review (we aim to have tickets in peer review for less than 4 hours). Keeping track of our cycle time helps us hold ourselves accountable, and to spot any bottlenecks in the development process and kanban board. In addition to that, we would also go over a number of other statistics relevant to our current OKRs, for example, website performance, email open rate, etc.
Stretch Goals
As mentioned, at the beginning of each week we get assigned stretch goals. These are often tasks which are often just out of reach, yet still achievable if we punch above. At Appear Here we like to challenge ourselves, but sometimes a week can go different to how we planned, and the team is always very understanding when these goals are not met. The stretch goals help us keep focused, and help keep us accountable for the work done each week,
Planning Meetings
At Appear Here, the software engineers play a big role in feature planning for the epics, and are kept in the loop regarding how our work affects the OKRs each quarter. Before we begin each epic we would typically have a meeting, we may do user story mapping, or a similar technique to help us work out the tickets we will need to complete the epic. We would then allocate ‘t-shirt sizes’ to each one to help us estimate how long each ticket will take, and ensure no ticket is too complicated. Ideally all tickets we work on take no longer than a day.
Retrospectives
Once a month, we would have a retrospective. We would put three columns on our glass board, ‘keep’, ‘introduce’ and ‘remove’. After 5–10 minutes of reflection, we would each have written a few post-it notes for each column. We would then go round the room putting up each of our post-it notes, giving a short summary of each one before sitting down. Once we all had done this, we would then, as a team, group the post-it notes into various topics. Then we would each have two votes, which we would give to the topics of our choosing. The topics with the most votes would then be discussed, and actions would be assigned to various team members to either improve, introduce, or change the way we work.
Beyond the general retrospectives, we would also have retrospectives for each epic we worked on. These would typically be more focussed than the more general monthly retrospectives.
Engineering/Design Talks
These typically are once every two weeks, and take no more than half an hour. In the engineering talks we would discuss as a group of engineers any problems we found in the code, anything slowing us down and any urgent refactors that need doing. In the design talks, the engineers would sit down with the designers and discuss ways we could improve the hand off of design to the developers, how we communicate, etc.
Battle Cry
At the very end of the week we would then have the battle cry. This was a quick meeting where each one of us, in order, would go over our stretch goals and whether we hit them or not then after that, what we found most frustrating during the week, followed by what we enjoyed most in the week. This was always quite a casual meeting to celebrate the successes of the week, with drinks and snacks.
Socials
At Appear Here we take pride in our culture, and we really aim to be a team that isn’t just made of colleagues, but friends. We have had some amazing socials, like Flight Club, Swingers Mini Golf and bowling. Since our team is quite international we also aimed to have meals at various restaurants for each of our team’s nationalities. We have tried czech, portugese, malaysian cuisine, and they have all been delicious, and amazing team nights out. Following the theme of different restaurants for each nationality, last year the team did a thanksgiving dinner with our american colleagues in the office. We had regular board game nights in the office where we played games like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride.
Friday Lunch
Every Friday, the whole company sits down around one or two big tables and all eat together, this is then followed by a company meeting where we go over the numbers for the week, any new product release, marketing announcements and birthday announcements.
How Things Changed With Lockdown
The lockdown in March 2020, upended the whole world of work. Whilst, as a team, a few of us may have worked from home once a week, we were suddenly all working from home all the time. Gone were the coffee and tea chats, gone were the technical discussions over lunch, gone were the quick questions to your colleague sitting right next to you, gone were the simple pairing sessions. Fortunately, as a product team, who all work from their computers, actually doing work from home was not too challenging, GitHub was the same, Jira was the same, Zoom wasn’t too different to what we were used to before. However, our culture and routines had to be adapted, we had to remain the Appear Here product team, a very social and collaborative team, whilst not working together in person.
Much to our relief, many of our routines and ‘battle rhythms’ were easy to adapt to online remote work. At the beginning of lockdown we even added some fun twists, for example, for battle cry, for the first few weeks, we had to show up on Zoom in fancy dress. Little things like that made the difference, and broke up the monotony of working from home with little human interaction. By maintaining the rhythms we already had, but updating them here and there to make them remote friendly, the team felt grounded, and as if nothing had changed. We still had a good time, despite being miles away from each other in some cases. We still worked towards stretch goals, still had the same meetings, and we still worked great together as a team.
Lockdown Challenges
Despite the fact that the overall structure of the week remained mostly unchanged, working remotely still presented challenges. For many, working from home provided a quiet environment where they can really knuckle down and focus, however, for others, like myself, working from home meant working surrounded by two toddlers and constant distraction. During this time Appear Here was very supportive and provided any flexibility we needed when trying to balance and adjust to our new lockdown lives. I found myself working from my car to find some quiet time to really focus, much to the amusement of my colleagues, and the confusion of my neighbours. Colleagues with older children, who had to teach them whilst the schools were closed, were allowed to work flexible hours, giving them the time during the day to focus on the education of their children, whilst still being able to work in the evenings.
Decisions mostly get made in meetings, but, as unofficial as they are, the ‘water cooler’ chats are also a very important part of day to day life in any company. Whilst we may not have a water cooler, speaking to colleagues whilst making tea, or going for a walk with them to grab lunch from Leather Lane were great ways to catch up, discuss and share problems, or to learn their point of view about something. With lockdown, these natural conversations between colleagues were gone, and it is something that is hard to artificially recreate whilst working remotely. Things like battle cry and engineering talks were a great way for the team to have more casual conversations, but we still missed the one to one chats. So, we introduced more 1:1s between peers. It felt like a huge relief to remind yourself that you share the same goals and visions for the codebase and company with your peers. These 1:1s typically happen once every two weeks, but I found they were a great way to improve team morale.
As mentioned before, the product team at Appear Here really loves their socials. However, without the ability to go out in person, or hang out in the office, something quite simple became something quite difficult. During the lockdown, Appear Here did company wide socials, various colleagues hosted cooking lessons (I even learnt how to make pasta through one of these), and trivia nights. As a product team, we also hosted some small socials, like cocktail making lessons and quiz nights. We have a mince pie baking social coming up, which will include how to make a mince pie martini.
As a software engineer at Appear Here, the lockdown gave us a chance to work on a number of new features that would really help improve the product, including the landlord tenant chat. However, that meant we still had to hire new developers to expand our team and increase our productivity. Mostly, the first two stages of our interview already happened remotely, the introductory phone call, and the technical challenge. However, we always liked to meet the candidate in person for the third and final stage. This had to happen via Zoom now, and whilst an online call could never quite match up to a real life face to face interview, it is close enough. The calls during the third stage would typically be two of us interviewing the candidate in either half an hour or hour interviews. The culture board interviews, where we assess the candidate’s compatibility with the company values, are also done online via Zoom. As Zoom calls back to back for four hours can be quite draining, we simply separated the third stage interview into two-two hour blocks on separate days.
It is very important to make any new joiner feel very welcome and part of the team as soon as possible. This presented another challenge for us during the lockdown, as each new joiner won’t be able to meet their colleagues for quite a while. Before the lockdown, new joiners used to have lunch with each team, this was a great way for the new joiner to meet everyone, not just the people they would be working with. This was actually easily replicated, instead of taking the new joiner out to lunch, the team would instead simply have a big Zoom call, where every person would introduce themselves to the new joiner. In one of these new joiner calls, some of the team even got their kids dressed up in Harry Potter outfits for a new joiner who said she was a Harry Potter fan. I feel that these new joiner calls have been a great way to introduce our team to every new joiner, and have been surprisingly effective.
Tools That Improved Our Remote Work
When doing meetings in person, it was easy to just stick post-it notes, draw diagrams or plan on one of Appear Here’s many glass boards. However, when we are all on a Zoom call, that can no longer be done. We discovered a number of great tools, or found that tools we were using before had even more use after the lockdown began. One of these amazing tools is Parabol, who describe themselves as providing a free agile retrospective tool for remote teams. This tool was perfect for our retrospectives. It was really easy for each team member to learn, really easy to group each reflection, and simple to format the columns the way we liked it. The app also shows the progress that everyone is making, so we are all aware when everyone is finished. Even though this tool is aimed at remote teams, I have no doubt we will be using it in our in-person retrospectives in the future.
Miro describe themselves as an online collaboration platform for teamwork. It was a tool that we had just started to use before lockdown. They have an amazing feature on their app, which converts photos of a whiteboard, for example, with post-it notes to a virtual board which can be edited and shared. However, in lockdown, Miro proved to be incredibly useful for our user story mapping and planning sessions. Like Parabol, it is very simple to use, and our team had no problems quickly jumping in and writing virtual post-it notes. It feels so productive to have Figma with any designs we may have planned for a feature on one screen and Miro on the other screen with the user story mapping.
Figma was another tool that has proved incredible during lockdown. The team’s designers had already started to use it, but, like Miro, Figma rose to the challenge of lockdown, and became a core part of our toolkit. As an engineer it is so useful to just choose a user to follow, such as a designer, and follow their mouse around the designs whilst on a call with them, it feels even easier than doing the meeting in person. Figma is a great tool that has made working in lockdown as part of a team so much easier, I cannot imagine working without the links directly to the specific part of the design, or the distance between elements it provides. It has really improved the collaboration between our designers and engineers.
Approaching The End of The Pandemic
Appear Here will never be a remote first team, but as a team we have risen to the challenge and kept on punching above, we have grown comfortable with working remotely . We found new ways to work and adjusted our battle rhythms to a new reality. The world of work is never going to be the same again, and in the future I believe that we will continue to use these tools and practises that we learnt during the pandemic. Combining what we learnt with how we worked before we will become even more productive when we finally return to the office hopefully sometime in 2021.
