Mango Time
How we make time for innovation and personal development
We all have busy schedules with lots of commitments to the products we’re building, supporting our business users, and the teams around us. This doesn’t leave much time for personal development, nor to experiment with new ideas or trial innovative new solutions. But it’s these new ideas and innovative approaches that could actually deliver the greatest value to the team and to ITV.
In our Group Technology (GT) Product team at ITV, we have developed Mango Time as a way of allocating dedicated time for these high value, deep tasks. This article describes how it works, some of the benefits we have realised, and what we learnt along the way.
Planting the seed
A couple of years ago, as the Lead Software Engineer of the GT Product Team, I was presented with a couple of conundrums.
- We needed to do more to make personal development time really meaningful for the team — we were already setting aside a day a month, but we were finding that take up was very low and even when used, a day once a month wasn’t the right length or frequency to allow people to really engage in something.
- We had recently developed and launched a successful new product MyClear (an app for our Music team to surface Music licensing information for productions). As it moved into business as usual, we needed a way to support and maintain the product without a dedicated team. How to make the time available, and how to spread the knowledge of the product across the team?
And so we introduced a new approach called Mango Time to address both of these problems. But over and above that, it also gave us a platform to do more innovation, and collaboration with other teams. Here’s how it works..
Growing the Mango
Key to the success of Mango Time is making a commitment to it as a team. We treat it as its own workstream in the same way we would any of the other products that we work on. It has its own dedicated resource (albeit on a rota’d basis), sprints, ceremonies, and processes.
We have set up a 2 weekly sprint cadence to match our other products. This makes it easier to allocate a member of the team to Mango for that sprint. This is done on a rota basis, and means that a person can focus fully on consuming mangoes (*the act of working on Mango tickets) for those 2 weeks.
We wanted to keep the agile process as light as possible, so there is only one regular Mango meeting per sprint, which is a combination of show & tell / demo, elaboration, and sprint planning. We also piggyback a quick Mango standup onto the end of one of our existing daily standups to minimise impact on diaries.
Mango tickets are collated on a Trello board. Anyone can add ideas as tickets (mangoes) in the New column. As a team we then discuss each mango to assign a priority and a rough indicator of the size or complexity.
Prioritisation is based on how much value (juice) we think the mango can provide, plus also how well that mango aligns with the goals of our team (as defined by our Objectives and Key Results — OKRs). This gives each mango one of 5 ratings from “Awesome” to “Whatever”. This determines where the mango goes in our Backlog, highest priority going first, with some consideration also going to urgency. Mangoes are then picked from the top of the Backlog to be worked on, and follow a kanban-like progression across the board.
Other items of note on the board:
- We can label mangoes with Epics as a grouping, for example if they are relevant to a particular product or workstream
- There is a column for personal development items, each ticket containing resources or a training syllabus that people have found useful. This provides structure to personal development, and a record of the skills we have accrued
- Some tickets are to be worked in the background, so sit under the strangely named off-backlog backlog
The juicy stuff — our Mango Time achievements
Mango Time gave us a platform to allow us to do more innovation, and collaboration with other teams. We’ve done things as diverse as calculating the carbon footprint of our products, introducing new technologies and tools, and helping to identify a consultancy partner to maintain an application used by our production companies in the US. Here are a few examples in more detail.
Introducing Kotlin
As a team we had identified the Kotlin programming language as a strategic technology to improve the accuracy and speed of our products, and make development more enjoyable. However, we found ourselves in a bit of a catch 22 situation. There was a certain amount of learning and research required to figure out which tools would be a best fit for us (e.g. which microcontainer framework to use?) before we could introduce it. But how to get the time to do that research if we weren’t working with it?
Using Mango Time, one of our developers Tom Mclean, along with others, reviewed options and built on top of a template approach developed by another ITV software engineering team to create a shell microservice in Kotlin with everything we needed. This was “ready to go”, such that we could immediately start using it in a workstream of one of existing products without missing a beat. This became our first Kotlin service running in Production, and provided the model for others to follow.
Not only that, Tom got to realise one of his personal development goals by gaining Kotlin skills.
Collaboration with the Cyber Security team
Another of our developers Darren Garsden has a keen interest in cyber security. So when ITV’s Cyber Security team were looking to procure a static analysis tool, it was the perfect opportunity for Darren to help them evaluate what this would mean for a software engineering team.
Darren got hands on with the tools we were evaluating, working directly with each vendor to analyse one of our products, and incorporate it into our build pipeline. The chosen tool would have to integrate seamlessly into our current engineering practices at ITV, otherwise adoption rates would be low. Darren’s input ensured this happened.
The result of this investigation was to select Checkmarx as our preferred supplier, and the tool has now been successfully rolled out across the other software engineering teams in ITV. This allows ongoing analysis of our in-house developed products to identify and resolve security vulnerabilities before they are released to Production.
A stone is a seed — failure is a positive result
Chatbots had been talked about within the team, so we thought we’d use Mango Time to implement a basic use case. We tried to create a chatbot interface for our automated deployment tool to allow us to start and stop test environments via commands entered into Slack.
The chatbot itself was built using DialogFlow, and integrated into Slack. However we found more work was needed than we had anticipated to integrate that with our deployment tool. Essentially we would have had to expose our infrastructure to the internet, along with all the security and data protection concerns that comes with. Whilst this was not insurmountable, it did mean more work was required than the value we would have gotten out of it. And so we stopped this particular investigation.
Whilst this was a disappointing result at the time, we have actually referred back to this investigation many times since, and have applied what we learnt to other potential chatbot use cases. In this case, failure has been a positive result :-)
Ripening the fruit
Mango Time has been running for a while now, and we’ve learnt a number of things along the way, and developed how we run it. Here are a few of those things:
The fruits of our labour
It’s easy to say developing ourselves professionally, and coming up with innovative solutions to business problems are both really important. It’s less easy to find the time to do either of those. Hopefully this article has illustrated how we are trying to do that within ITV’s Group Tech Product Management Team.
Using Mango Time we create dedicated time for both of those things, an environment where we can try new things, collaborate with new people, and it’s ok to fail. Not only that, we also support and maintain products without it impacting any ongoing projects.
So why is it called Mango Time? Well .. erm .. in short we couldn’t think of a better name 😕. Mango Time incorporates so many things, it was hard to sum it all up in one short phrase .. so we didn’t bother and went for a tropical fruit instead! 😂
