Beyond Agile: Rituals of High-Performing Engineering Teams
Agile methodology is the cornerstone of many engineering teams in today’s fast-paced tech environment. Most of us are familiar with Scrum and Kanban, and we diligently follow their rituals, from daily stand-ups to sprint retrospectives (Which methodology is my favorite? The answer is here).
However, as any seasoned engineering manager will tell you, Agile isn’t enough to build a successful team or a winning product.
Through my personal experience, I’ve developed additional rituals that have proven instrumental in creating a stronger, more cohesive team and driving product success🚀💪. I want to share 4 of them with you.
#1 “Numberzz”: Data-Driven Alignment and Improvement
Audience: Engineering team, Product, Design, Marketing, Business
Every month, my team gathers for a “Numberzz” meeting, a dedicated session to track our data, goals, and key metrics. Often, team members lack awareness of the team’s objectives and essential metrics, leading to a lack of context and sometimes even low motivation. This is why I believe such a meeting is crucial for any team. In addition to the context, it creates a shared accountability and responsibility of the entire extended team to track their numbers. This session serves multiple purposes:
- Reviewing Metrics: We review the previous month’s stats, including our leading KPIs, important user and usage metrics, and any insights derived from the data.
- Open Discussion: After presenting the data, the floor is open for discussion. Team members can suggest what else should be tracked and propose ideas to improve our metrics. This collaborative approach ensures everyone is aligned and actively contributing to our success.
- Actionable Insights: By fostering an environment where questions and ideas are encouraged, we often uncover innovative ways to achieve better results. This ritual keeps everyone informed and empowers the team to take ownership of our goals.
- Track Action Items: The ideas raised during the meeting are converted into actionable tasks the team is responsible for completing. In the subsequent meeting, we review these action items to ensure continuity and the effectiveness of our ideation process.
#2 “Monthly Ideation”: Harnessing the Power of Collective Creativity
Audience: Engineering team, Product, Design, Marketing, Business
Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation; it thrives in a collaborative environment. Our monthly “Ideation” meeting is a platform where team members are encouraged to propose product, marketing, and business ideas. Taking an active part in contributing to the product’s roadmap increases the team members’ motivation and accountability for the team’s success. Here’s how we make it work:
- Safe Space for Ideas: Everyone can suggest an idea. We believe in the “there are no dumb questions/ideas” principle. All ideas are valued, even if they aren’t immediately accepted.
- Diverse Contributions: By involving everyone in the ideation process, we tap into diverse perspectives and experiences. This often leads to creative solutions that might not emerge from a top-down approach.
- Structured Innovation: Each idea is discussed and evaluated, providing a structured yet flexible framework for innovation. This ritual stimulates creativity and ensures the best ideas are identified and pursued.
#3 “10X”: Pushing Technological Boundaries
Audience: Engineering team
Our “10X” meetings, held every other month, are dedicated to exploring how to improve our technology and efficiency significantly. The demands of the product roadmap and daily tasks can often overshadow the need for technological evolution. Much like product ideation, it’s essential to provide a space where engineers can dream big and propose ambitious ideas that propel us forward. These sessions are crucial for pushing the limits and raising the bar:
- Technological Advancements: We discuss and implement projects such as incorporating a monitoring and alerting stack, using open telemetry, and adopting tools for managing feature flags and A/B tests.
- Efficiency Improvements: We cover topics like defining PR standards and other best practices to enhance our workflow, developer experience, and productivity.
- Unlocking Product Barriers: Technological evolution can often unlock product barriers, increase efficiency, and improve velocity, enabling us to deliver features faster and with higher quality.
- Ambitious Goals: By setting ambitious goals (i.e., deploy code 10X faster), we challenge ourselves to think bigger and strive for significant improvements, fostering a culture of continuous growth and excellence.
#4 “Monthly Stakeholders Meeting”: Ensuring Alignment
Audience: The leaders of Engineering, Product, Design, Marketing, and Business including high-level managers (VPs).
Communication and alignment with stakeholders are crucial for any engineering team’s success. Our monthly “Stakeholders” meeting ensures that managers and relevant stakeholders from the company are on the same page. While Product and R&D are often aligned, other important stakeholders such as marketing, sales, and customer success might not be part of all the weekly rituals and can sometimes be out of the loop. Different stakeholders might have varying agendas and plans that, without structured discussion, could surprise the team and unexpectedly alter plans. When everyone is aligned and aware of what has been done and what each party aims to achieve, the plan becomes more concise, with fewer surprises.
- Progress Updates: We provide updates on our progress and discuss current and future plans.
- Conflict Resolution: This meeting serves as a platform for raising conflicting opinions or priorities. By addressing these issues openly, we aim to reach a consensus and ensure everyone is aligned.
- Strategic Alignment: It’s a place for strategic discussions, ensuring our engineering efforts align with the broader business objectives.
- Inclusive Communication: By including marketing, sales, customer success, and all the relevant stakeholders in these discussions, we keep all departments informed and aligned, preventing any disconnects.
- Minimized Surprises: With structured discussions, we can anticipate and integrate all stakeholders’ different agendas and plans, reducing the likelihood of unexpected changes.
How to start?
- First, discuss them with your team. You can do it during your weekly 1:1s or raise them as topics for discussion during your retro meeting (Here’s a great article about Retrospective done right!). Start with what you seek and how such rituals might help.
- I suggest starting with only some of these rituals at once, focusing on the one or two that solve an immediate pain. Start with them, and then gradually add the next ones.
- Then, schedule them and spread them throughout the month. Make them recurring so they become a habit rather than a “one-off.”
- Add an agenda for every meeting, explaining the purpose of the meeting, what the audience should expect, and what you expect from them.
- Come prepared for every meeting — gather the important metrics, list the topics for discussion, encourage team members to speak at these sessions, and constantly seek to improve them so that they will always bring value.
- Bonus: Here’s an excellent way to ensure that the various ideas and initiatives raised are tracked and eventually completed.
Conclusion
While Agile provides a solid foundation, I found that additional rituals like “Numberzz,” “Ideation,” “10X,” and “Stakeholders” are essential for fostering a high-performing engineering team.
These rituals drive alignment and innovation and empower team members to contribute actively to our success. I incorporated these rituals in every company I’ve worked for; they have always brought tremendous value to me and my teams.
What are your additional rituals? Write down in the comments 🙏🏼💬
