Keeping on top of the small stuff: the importance of ‘always-on’ development teams
Chris Collingridge has previously written around out how we organise our product and tech teams at Auto Trader, in from squads to swarms. In his blog post, Chris briefly touches on our ‘maintenance’(a.k.a ‘always-on’) teams; I’d like to go into some more detail around what our always-on teams are, what role they play, and why they’re valuable to us at Auto Trader.
What is an ‘always-on’ team at Auto Trader?
Unlike some of our other product and tech teams which swarm around a strategic priority our always-on teams aren’t working towards a roadmap or release date. Instead, these teams provide invaluable support in maintaining and enhancing products and services which we aren’t currently swarming around.
Developers from across our product engineering tribe roll on and off our always-on teams every two weeks. In my team, 25 developers are on the rota to support the team for two weeks every few months. We ensure that work undertaken in these teams is approx. a maximum of one week’s development effort. Any work larger than this would slow down the rate at which we can deliver value and make it much more difficult to handover work between developers.
What role do always-on teams play?
The team I work in focuses on maintaining and enhancing our retailer-facing products and platform which are not currently being swarmed around. This includes Dealer Portal, where our retailer customers (over 23,000 users in the past month) go to manage their stock, adverts and access products which give them insight into their advert performance, market trends, and much more. We work closely with our technical product support team, operations engineers, account management teams, product managers, designers, tech leads and many many more across the business to identify areas of focus which we look to investigate, analyse, and prioritise for development.
After nearly two years of thoroughly enjoying running an always-on team since joining Auto Trader as a Graduate Business Analyst, I thought it would be worth delving into why I think these teams are so important — because they allow us at Auto Trader keep on top of the small stuff, including…
1) Continuously evaluate and improve user experience
As time moves on, user needs change and evolve. Some user journeys built one, two, or more years ago may need tweaking based on user feedback. Or perhaps some features didn’t make it into the development roadmap when a product was initially released, but it’s become a priority to make these features available to users now.
As an always-on team, we have the capacity to spend time evaluating, analysing, and making changes to product features based on feedback and discussions with product managers, designers and others around the business. These are enhancements we may have otherwise not had capacity to work on as they don’t fit with our current strategic priorities, but they could still be of value to our users.
Furthermore, we meet with our technical product support team twice every week to understand what support queries they are receiving from our retailer customers and account management team. Coupling this with the wealth of data we have around user behaviour from tools such as Contentsquare, GetFeedback and Looker, we are able to constantly evaluate if any pain-points in user journeys which could require some analysis and resolution.
Our always-on teams allows us to capture, understand, and resolve any pain-points as well as continuously evaluate and improve our user’s experience rather than disrupting high-priority work going on in the tribe.
2) Share knowledge
In our Product Engineering tribe, all our developers get the opportunity to work on a support team. This means that our developers get exposure to products or parts of the platform that they may not have worked on before. In order to complete work, they may need to collaborate with subject matter experts across the business to understand the business and technical context of the area they’re working in. We’ve found that over time this spreads knowledge and reduces the chance of having any key person dependencies in the tribe.
3) Keep the platform healthy
On the retailer side of our Product Engineering tribe alone, we have over 100 services. That’s over 100 services that require maintenance and platform upgrades to ensure they are functioning efficiently and not leaving any unwanted technical debt. In addition to regular platform maintenance, we will occasionally have a service which requires decommissioning or migration to the cloud. Whilst each of our services has owners and maintainers, sometimes it’s not feasible for work to be done by them but best to be handled by us. This means we’re still able to undertake this critical work whilst not disrupting the teams who are swarming around our strategic objectives.
To summarise, always-on teams are valuable to us at Auto Trader as they allow us to enhance our platforms while simultaneously swarming around priority projects. They enable us to share knowledge around our product and tech teams, and continuously support the maintenance of our systems. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
