Learning from your team members

How agile is changing the way I approach new things.

Learning. We are living in a moment of the human history where we are exposed like we’ve never been to opportunities to learn new things.

Tutorial on Youtube, Online courses, Workshops, Infinite access to books and to knowledge in general thanks to “the internet”. However, I think that due to the fact that there are so many opportunities we are easily misled, ending up wasting 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon on arguably useful courses on “marketing” or whatever your thing is.

I have been doing that for a long time and I still do (last Cyber Monday I decided to spend something like £80 on courses on Udemy, come on, there was 90% off!), but in the past six month-ish I have been experiencing a new way to learn things and I believe that this is the real game changer for those willing to learn new things:

Working in a small startup and embrace Agile Methodologies.

I have already written how the Agile concepts are changing parts of my life (here: “enjoying my stay back at my parents’ place”), but today I am going to simply share my experience, describing what it is like to learn new things thanks to the people you are working with.

First things first: we are a very small team: Christian De Martin (CFO), Lise Arlot (CMO), Romano (Art Hunter), Gregorio Galante and Antonio Dal Cin (Back-end), Riccardo Zanutta (Front-end) and me (CEO). We also had the luck to work with amazing people for our branding, for the UX, and for the SEO planning, but the main people I’ve been interacting with, for the past months has been the one I mentioned.

I have a very unusual academic background (Project management and marketing for my BA and Big Data for my MA), I have always been fascinated by Design and I have always wanted to be able to code.

Having the possibility to work daily with people who knew how to code, who where designers and front-end developers, marketing or finance people would have been cool enough. But I also had the luck to be the one who was meant to pull the strings in the team.

I was expected (and I still am actually) to know what was going on in each department and what everybody was working on with such detail that I needed to have an understating of each subject.

I, therefore, started studying and asking the team. I had the possibility to get good quality information from the very beginning, good papers to read, good tutorials/courses.

And here is when the Agile methodology comes into play: the sprint reviews.

For those who don’t know what they are, sprint reviews are weekly meetings where a team discusses what has been done in the past week and where the team plans the following week.

At Feral Horses, I have a sprint review with the development team (sometimes we also do a mid-sprint), a sprint review with our CMO, a sprint review with our Art Hunter and one with our CFO. In those sprints I am supposed to understand what they tell me and tell them what are is happening in the other departments.

You can imagine how challenging that can be. Understanding what a coder tells you can be hard if you are a non-coder, well… think about explaining what a coder told you to a non coder.

The sprint reviews put me in a place where I had to understand what everyone was telling me at such a deep level that could then allow me to explain the same concept to a variety of different people, with different knowledge and different interests.

For example, when the implementation of the service provider’s API for the payment was carried on I had to understand the process at a level that could allow me to:

• Tell the Art Hunter how it roughly worked and why we picked that one
• Explain the CFO how that could work with our bank, and get feedbacks on the financial workflow (so that to explain it back to the developers)
• Tell the CMO how that would/could impact our funnel
• Give feedback on the design and the UI

All those things were things I didn’t necessarily know. I had to study.

And every week was and still is like that example.

With the time I am understanding what each person is interested and I try to deliver the most meaningful information to each member of the team, bearing in mind the knowledge they have in each single subject. And that is giving me, every week, the possibility to learn new things and test my knowledge with a variety of people.

Is it the same for you? Have you had any similar experience?

Let’s talk about it, that is what the comments are for!