How we deliver in Firefly
The Delivery Team at Firefly aims to empower teachers, parents and students by researching, designing and developing a product that gives teachers more time to teach and students more ways to learn.
The Delivery Team comprises of squads. A squad is a team of people who work closely everyday to build a product incrementally and iteratively in a time-boxed manner. We have two squads: Reach and Engagement; each working on different streams; more on this later.
Firefly works in quarters, and we decide together which key areas we will work on for the quarter. In each quarter the squads work in 2-week cycles(also called sprints) so that we can readjust ourselves every two weeks. Then we do research, design, development and test simultaneously for two weeks and release on the third week until the quarter ends, and repeat again!
The Streams
We have three streams of work in Delivery.
- The first stream supports live users if they have any pressing issues. We have a few members of each squad each week working in this stream.We call it App Support. For the first stream we embrace the Principle of Agile- “Our highest Priority is to Satisfy customer needs”.
- The second stream looks at what enhancement we can do in our current features to keep improving the experience for our current Firefly Users and to satisfy their needs. The Engagement Squad looks after this stream of work.
- The third stream looks at what we can build to attract non Firefly schools. The Reach Squad looks after this stream of work.
There are three phases that work in parallel in the second and third stream. These are as follows:
The Discovery Phase
In the Discovery Phase we listen to our users, the world and our experiences to create hypotheses. We gather more information on each hypothesis and review these. If our findings are worth pursuing further, we design mock-ups and test these to get feedback from our existing or potential users.
Sometimes, while pursuing a hypothesis, we get more ideas and we keep gathering more information on these too.
The Product Refinement phase
When our research is formalised enough and we have some solid ideas on what we want to build, these then go through our product funnel. Teams gather together, to think about the effort and time required to build and flesh out the ideas into tasks with more details. They work together to refine and re-prioritise these tasks. The tasks sit in our Product Backlog until the development team are ready to work on them in their 2 week sprints.
The Delivery Phase
Every two weeks the squads add tasks from the Product Backlog that they think they can build, to the Sprint Backlog, to work on. They constantly Build-> Review->Test these tasks and get feedback as soon as possible whilst working towards release. We have a release committee who decides if we want to release a build or work more on the tasks in the next iteration before sending these out to the Firefly users. The release committee is a group of people who represent each key area involved in creating the product.
Our releases are 3 week cycles where we release anything from new features, new capabilities and bug fixes. When releasing, we also embrace the Principle of Agile - “ Working software is the primary measure of progress”.
The whole picture
Squads
Our squads are comprised of everyone who is needed to get the work done. They are: UX researchers, Product designers, Product Managers, Leads, Developers, Testers, and Scrum Masters. They are the stars! When working within the squads we embrace the Principle of Agile -“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
Note: We are constantly experimenting and fine tuning what we do, so stay tuned for more updates on how we work!
