An introduction to Agile at SumUp
As we continue to grow as an organisation, our needs change and we have to adapt to become more resilient — here’s a brief overview of how and why we use Agile to accomplish that.
SumUp has transformed the lives of millions of small business owners by providing them with payment solutions and financial tools. Our vision is creating a world where small merchants can be successful doing what they love. We have been successful in realising that vision; our exponential growth in both business and people proves that.
At the start of our Agile journey, we were about 500 people. We saw significant workforce growth year after year — now we stand at around 2000 people. As a result, there’s more complexity and uncertainty, which means to thrive and continue our growth, we have to become a more resilient organisation.
It’s easy to assume that the most important thing is having the strength and resistance to face adversities and difficult moments. People project that notion onto teams, companies, and of course, systems. We think that if we are strong enough, nothing will drag us down, and it’s just a matter of avoiding the hit. But it’s the ability to recover from difficult situations and adapt to new circumstances that helps us learn and evolve.
In a complex world, we will always encounter unknown situations and new demands of the market. When this happens, we want to have the resilience to change direction as quickly as possible and learn in iterations to reduce our level of uncertainty. Agile is our strategy to develop this ability.
Returning to our mission, we want to empower and support small merchants, those who are courageous enough to follow their dreams by starting a business. Like them, we at SumUp are courageous and eager to succeed. We also understand that trust and empathy are powerful tools that enable teams to build success.
This is all encapsulated in our core values:
Founder’s Mentality: we are pragmatic. We rank wisely, based on our mission, what we should spend time and effort on.
Team First: we believe in (autonomous) teams over individuals.
We Care: we are humble, transparent, and learn from our mistakes — and we put merchants’ needs at the forefront of everything we do.
Adopting an Agile mindset allows us to live up to our values, achieve our mission, and build resilience to readjust our direction or recover from breaks.
A fundamental part of being a resilient organisation is our understanding of Agile teams. We want to be able to build teams as needed and optimise our value streams or flows according to the circumstances. We believe the best approach is using mission-oriented and cross-functional teams. Teams structured in this way have clarity about their purpose and autonomy to make decisions and provide what the merchants need most.
But how do we know we are on the right path? To guide us and adjust our course along our journey we’re using findings from Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. In this book, the authors list patterns that they found, based on 23,000 data-sets in high-performance teams. This data has been collected since 2014 via the State of DevOps report.
The book groups the factors of high-performance teams into 5 categories (Architecture, Continuous Delivery, Lean Management and Monitoring, Culture, and Product and Processes). High-performance teams will have four similar indicators: multiple deployments a day, new code to deployment in less than 1 hour (lead time for changes), recovery from incidents (MTTR) in less than 1 hour, and change fail rates between 0–15%.
The advantage of this approach is to help us have a data-driven method for our Agile journey. We collect the key metrics, so each team has a dashboard to assess its own delivery performance. We also use these KPIs as a starting point for continuous improvement sessions.
Additionally, we assess the overall perception of 24 key capabilities — found by the authors to drive improvements in software delivery performance — in a survey three times a year. We say ‘perception’ here because each person in the Engineering and Product group answers according to their own understanding and reality. The results can show us how aligned people are with the capabilities, and also generate awareness and discussions about the concepts.
Another important finding from the Accelerate book is if we invest time and effort on the 24 key capabilities this will promote a generative culture — where the collaboration is high, risks are shared and failures lead to inquiry. This culture promotes less pain during software deployment, meaning there’s less need for rework, and higher employee engagement and loyalty — creating a high-performance organisation.
Our squads use a chart, like the one below, to see how favourable their capabilities are — using it to guide them on what to improve in their next iterations.
To summarise, our Agile journey is here to help us to build a resilient organisation, based on autonomous, cross-functional teams. With our empowered teams, we can quickly adapt to changes in the market and recover from adverse situations. And by assessing them through the 24 capabilities and 4 key metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, MTTR and change fail percentage) provide us with data to guide our journey.
This is only an introduction. In upcoming posts, we’ll describe and provide our playbooks, and cover topics like how we define our KPIs, how we use data inside the squads, what we’ve learned from our sessions, and the practices we’re trying at SumUp to be a resilient organisation.
