Guilds in Tech

What are they and how can they help you?

Your company is growing at an exponential rate. Every month you’ve got more and more new colleagues. If at some point you knew all other FE Developers or Data Scientists by name, by now you don’t even know how many there are, as you all work independently in your multidisciplinary development teams. So how can you keep up with each other and continue sharing the knowledge?

Guilds are there to help you! Think of them like groups of people within the same craft and knowledge domain coming together to share and benefit from each other. They enable similar roles to learn and collaborate with each other, and at Just Eat Takeaway (JET) we’ve got more than 20 of them.

Why should you have guilds?

“The guild has helped us to bring together our machine learning feature teams to share skills and information, talk about interesting finds of issues and support upskilling. In a larger company this is really important as it can be quite hard to ensure constant lines of communication across large areas of the business,” says Kate Richardson (Engineering Lead/Principal Software Engineer), who used to be a chair of the Machine Learning Product Development Guild. And she’s far from the only one seeing benefits. I talked with several of my colleagues active in various guilds, and they all keep mentioning similar benefits.

“I like how easy it is to now get in touch and collaborate with the greatest technical experts from across our giant multinational company. With a simple question in our Slack channel or in one of our meetings, you can get some serious know-how to help tackle your issue. As an added bonus, everyone learns from each other during such a discussion,” confirms Guild Events chair Rob Sival (Lead Software Developer).

Noor Us Sabah Shah (Test Automation Engineer) is the chair of the Quality Engineering Guild and also mentions that it gives the possibility for people from different offices and streams to come together. “I chose to chair the guild as I wanted to ensure that quality engineers meet regularly and do knowledge sharing sessions,” she says.

How are the guilds structured?

As you can see, it’s not necessary to be a principal to be involved or even to chair a guild. That’s one of the biggest perks — it’s not a hierarchy led initiative, as even juniors can be chairs. Being active in a guild gives you a good opportunity to use skills you usually wouldn’t be able to do within your role. Think of organising meetings, facilitating workshops, being in touch with internal or even external speakers. It’s a perfect way for anybody to develop their leadership skills, and we even have some guilds who rotate their chairs every few months.

“The role of the chair is more of a figurehead, a person that the wider community can engage with to find out more. The chair also ensures that the guild is still viable, reporting metrics to the community team and ensuring that we have the minimum requirements in place,” clarifies Darren Capper (Principal Agile Coach), who has been chairing the Agile Coaching Guild since it was started a few years ago. As a chair he makes sure that monthly meetings take place, the guild has company-wide visibility (so every department and role is welcome to join) and there are clear objectives towards which the guild is working.

The list of all guilds is available in our intranet, where one can find their descriptions, Slack channels, and chair names to get in touch with for more information. Almost all the guilds have public Slack channels, so you can also pop in to browse through and decide if you want to join. To be honest, it wasn’t always so clear and structured — when the first meetings took place, there was no clear structure and overview, so now we can really appreciate the formalised change. “In 2018 we had a community of practice who got together a couple of times a year to share what they had been doing since the last meeting. Quite rapidly it became apparent that the community was not working as well as it could have and it was being driven into silos,” remembers Darren, who later also worked to bring more structure to the Agile Coaching Guild.

Ashley Watson-Nolan (Principal Engineer) is chairing the FrontEnd Guild which might have been the first JET Guild (might as it was created before guilds were an official thing). He recalls that the beginning was quite similar: “The FrontEnd Guild started about 6 years ago within the legacy Just Eat company as a way for Front-End Engineers to get together and help communicate across teams and departments. We used to meet up back then every month to share and discuss what was going on across projects and to discuss front-end technologies and if/how we can use new front-end technologies in our sites.”

Where to start if you want to introduce guilds?

I asked Kate, Rob, Noor, Darren and Ashley for tips for anybody who wants to create guilds in their own company. These are their combined top 5 suggestions:

• Do your research and talk with people — is the guild topic relevant and interesting for other people? Are there a few early supporters who are ready to join and run it together? A guild run by a single person will ultimately suffer and stagnate. So see who might be interested and what topics can be tackled within the boundaries of the guild.
• Decide how often you want to meet up and stick to that. It helps to have a regular cadence of catch-ups, so there is structure and clear expectations when you come together. It also helps to publish the agenda in advance so people know what to expect and you can gauge their interest with little teasers. But don’t worry if especially in the beginning you run out of ideas — sometimes just opening the floor and saying ‘what do you want to discuss today?’ is enough.
• Once you know who you are doing it together with and what’s the focus of the guild, have it in writing. Think of a purpose, how can people join, what questions potential members might have, and put it all in writing. Think of it as your internal sales brochure.
• Use internal tools to publicise your meetups. Don’t be afraid to overshare, especially in the beginning. And remember, word of mouth is a very powerful tool, so talk with people privately and approach future members directly as well (but don’t spam those who might not be interested, of course). That way you will find other interested people who in turn will know others interested. People can’t join something if they don’t know it exists.
• Get support from upper management! Their support is crucial if you want members to be able to commit significant time to it or have time to attend your meetups. Having them to open up or attend some sessions also helps others to see and understand the importance of your guild(s).

And let’s sum it up with Darren’s words: “A guild can take quite a bit of time and energy to mobilise, but once it’s running, it builds momentum. Stick at it, and think of your members’ needs. You are there to help them, to create a safe space for them to learn and grow. It’s worth it.”

So — good luck getting started with your guilds! Have trust in yourself and just go for it! And if you come across any issues along the way, reach out to us here at Just Eat Takeaway (or any other company you know who has guilds) — let’s help each other.

Written by Anita Kalmane, Senior Scrum Master @ Just Eat Takeaway.com. Special thanks to all the interviewed people for their input!

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