A day in the life

I am Zoe, the Product Owner and engineering team leader for Alfa’s suite of Point of Sale applications. I am usually based in the London office working for clients across Europe but, like most people, I am now working from home. My new workspace is a small, foldaway table in my living room in Queen’s Park.

Here’s an insight into the kinds of things I get up to on a typical day in my role at Alfa.

My usual set-up for a busy day on Zoom.

7:30

Whilst working from home during lockdown I’ve enjoyed getting out for a run first thing in the morning. The main pleasure in this is that I don’t have to wake up super early to squeeze it in thanks to not having my usual 45-minute commute. After a slow breakfast and coffee, I’m ready for the day.

8.30–9.00

Catch up on emails, make my To-Do list.

I look after a number of streams of work for various implementation projects and application builds, so I generally split tasks between each stream so that I can easily prioritise based on delivery timelines. The development team works in weekly sprints using the Scrum framework so our Jira Kanban board is my bible.

9.00–10.30

Weekly Sprint ceremony with the full development team.

At the moment, this is the best part of my working week. Whilst our team has a stand-up each morning, it’s nice to spend a bit of extended time together where there’s more space to chat and share what we’ve been doing for the last week. Since being privy to some of my calls, my boyfriend has been amazed by how friendly we all are with each other at Alfa.

The ceremony typically includes:

• A Demo of any application feature changes. Often, internal stakeholders are invited to this part of the ceremony by way of an update and as a chance for the whole team to receive any immediate feedback. Stakeholders can include client project managers and members of our sales team.
• A Retrospective with the team. We like to use MetroRetro, particularly when working remotely. It provides a fun and inclusive way to review the previous week’s Sprint, recognise our successes and think about how we can improve.
• Poker planning of development tasks for the upcoming sprint. We use Jira to administer our development ‘tickets’. Each ticket will have been created and functionally defined by the Product Owner. The tickets are discussed and prioritised in a backlog refinement meeting and further technically refined by the architect on the team. Therefore by the time we poker plan, each ticket should have a well-defined technical approach to inform the estimate.

11.00–11.30

UI/UX design review.

During a definition phase, I meet regularly with Alfa’s Head of UI Design, Ian, to update and finalise wireframes for the upcoming feature build. Recently the highlight of these meetings is often a visit from one of his toddlers!

11.30–13.00

Tick off some To-Dos.

Common tasks include:

• Producing any deliverables due to clients including feature definition documentation.
• Schedule/take meetings with the client to run through questions about specific features.
• Catch up with the core platform Product Engineering team to liaise about upcoming web service changes. All client requirements are carefully considered by the competency experts and delivered such that they can be used as widely as possible.
• Meet with internal client project managers to discuss any upcoming releases, feature development progress and bug fixes. This enables me to prioritise our tasks appropriately based on their feedback.

13.00–14.00

Lunch.

My boyfriend and I try to get out for a walk to break up the day and always make the effort to eat together. We’re spending a lot more time together which has been a silver lining to lockdown.

Every other Friday the team has a themed social lunch where we take it in turns to run a quiz. These have been great to maintain the ‘teaminess’ whilst we’re not together in the office.

The theme was ‘countries’ and I was assigned Norway, obviously.

14.00–15.30

Wireframing session with the client.

For new features we’re building in our applications, it’s key to understand how the client expects the application to behave whilst making new suggestions based on our UI/UX experience. Wireframing can be useful throughout the full delivery of an application and not just before the initial build.

15:30–16:00

Write up notes from the meeting and distribute to attendees.

It’s important to ensure that any assumptions and exclusions are communicated early in case of misunderstandings in the design session. Often creative sessions can include a lot of new and sometimes random ideas, so having a clear output brings everybody back onto the same page.

16.00–17.00

Quality Assurance test any changes to our Point of Sale applications.

I am responsible for testing that features work as expected, are in line with our client requirements, and meet our high UI/UX standards.

17.00–17.30

Sprint admin and delivery planning.

Whilst delivering an agile project with such short release cadences, a lot can change in a day. On ceremony days, depending on what has been included in this week’s sprint, a re-assessment of prioritisation and dependencies may be required.

Of course, no two days are the same and depending on the phase of a project we are working on (definition, build, user testing) my tasks can vary hugely. However, one thing always stays the same and that is the focus on delivering value to the end user.