Clue’s Erasmus Exchange
We set up a “study abroad” program for our engineers. Here’s how it went.
Our Erasmus Exchange at Clue was inspired from the European Union’s Erasmus Program. You might have heard about it or been lucky to have taken part in it. It is a program that allows students to study in different countries across Europe to learn about their host country, and encourages cultural exchange.
Our Erasmus Exchange, in a similar spirit, lets engineers cross their regular chapter borders to learn about different technologies and better understand other chapters. This is in line with our values of sharing, learning and collaborating.
Chapters and Cross-Functional Teams
At Clue, we work in engineering chapters and cross-functional feature teams. Last year, we concentrated on developing our chapters. We are now focused on improving our cross-functional teams.
Chapters: Specific domain teams, such as the Android chapter, backend chapter, iOS chapter, QA chapter, and web chapter.
Cross-Functional Teams: Feature teams made up of engineers from multiple chapters, as well as a designer and a product owner.
As part of the Erasmus Exchange, a mobile engineer might choose to visit the backend chapter. A dev ops might be curious about QA and make a visit. Or a front end engineer might decide to experience the Android world.
The idea is that the Erasmus visitor:
- Takes part in the host chapter’s weekly syncs
- Assists in feature planning and design
- Contributes to the code base if applicable
The Erasmus Exchange takes the engineer away from their regular chapter for about two days per month for a total of two months.
The benefits of an engineer exchange program
For one, the Erasmus Exchange fosters collaboration and encourages knowledge sharing to improve the decision making process. Adding a fresh point of view can challenge assumptions and spark creativity when it comes to finding new approaches to technical problems. All this creates a more cohesive cross-functional team. It is a great opportunity to understand the other chapters’ home ground without the bias of being from a different chapter.
It also saves us time. For example, creating more connections between the iOS and Android chapters minimizes the amount of overlapping work each chapter completes. This is especially true when designing features and doing conceptual work, where both chapters address similar challenges and could benefit from a single conversation with more voices. These collaborations would require the two chapters to tackle features at the same time, which adds an extra level of unity and focus.
The Erasmus Exchange would also help our engineers see their own work and their chapter within a broader context. Working with this perspective not only influences how an engineer works in their own chapter, but changes the way that they perceive and interact with other chapters. This broad understanding strengthens careers and further gives everyone greater flexibility within the engineering team.
Reflecting on my Erasmus
I volunteered for the first round of the Erasmus Exchange. I am an iOS engineer, and was curious about the world outside Apple’s bubble. I knew what it took to make Clue from a mobile perspective, but not so much about the backend considerations surrounding it.
I appreciated getting to know the backend engineers and the more minute details of their day-to-day work with concerns around scalability, stability, security and monitoring, amongst others.
It was beneficial to take in the team dynamics in the first few weeks and understand the chapter’s way of work which naturally differed from ours. Over those two months, I picked up some good practices to adopt in the iOS chapter as well as shared a piece of our chapter.
Conclusion
Much like the real Erasmus Program, every experience will be unique and it is hard to predict how it will differ across individuals. But mine was an overall success.
While I could have dedicated more of my time submitting pull requests to the backend code base, I decided to instead join all the syncs, share my point of view in the architectural decision-making process, and strengthen relationships.
At the end of the day, our success does come down to how well we come together as one engineering team. The Erasmus Exchange is currently only within the engineering team, but who knows—in the future, it might expand across business domains to include designers, product owners, and more.
Special thanks to Alessio, Chris, Lukascz and Pieter for having me!
