Agile at ManoMano, we do our MACS — Part 1
Here we are with a first article about MACS! This blog post aims to share a glimpse of our agile evolutionary framework and the guiding principles, and later the key patterns and ongoing experimentations.
End of 2019, Nicolas Martin was writing this post, giving some insight about how Agile was scaling in our growth context. Let me tell you that in 2+ years time, lots of parameters have drastically changed.
Good business results are both a blessing and a curse to an organization sometimes. When a company is growing rapidly, in the so-called hyper growth context, it is easy to take things like Agile and Product culture for granted but… they are not. One of the main symptoms that can ring a bell and that I am chasing is about the perception/verbatim that talk about software factories compared to considering the product teams are value generators, and creative problem solvers.
Let’s be honest, this growth has also pushed us to the limits of our current organizational structure and, after experimenting to handle different big cross-teams topics, the decision with our C-level was to initiate some changes and prepare for the future.
I see it very crucial in this very fast changing context to build the foundation of a learning organization. An organization that we aim at continuously auto-improve in terms of culture and ways of working towards excellence, in solving more and more complex user, business and technical problems.
ManoMano Advanced Collaboration System
At ManoMano, we aim to empower people to sustainably make their own kind of world and therefore being the largest responsible online home improvement specialist in Europe, for customers & partners.
We had this strong belief that we could improve:
- the way we collaborated,
- the way we built and deployed,
- the way we prioritized,
- the way we solved problems,
- the way we roadmapped
That’s why Agile at Scale was introduced at ManoMano and gave birth to :
MACS: The ManoMano Advanced Collaboration System!
MANOMANO ADVANCED COLLABORATION SYSTEM TO ENABLE AN AUTO-SCALING SOCIAL & TECH LEARNING ORGANIZATION GENERATING MASSIVE CUSTOMER AND BUSINESS IMPACT.
- MACS is about culture, mindset and ways of working to foster collaboration, customer/seller centricity and value/impact generation;
- It’s also about taking the best of Product, Agile and Engineering inspirations that are out there, and that we are assembling together to make our own framework;
- It’s about finding the right balance between scaling our organization and descaling our complexity, meaning: Welcoming more and more Manas and Manos while exposing and reducing dependencies and looking for the minimum efficient need for cooperation and synchronization (rituals, layers, roles, …).
- It’s yet purely, and by design, a fast-evolving framework that we can not keep publicly up-to-date, knowing it evolves as fast as our needs.
Our guiding principles
Agile as a means, not as a goal.
Did you meet any sports team having a goal of adopting a certain tactical formation? Of course, no! The successful ones, at least from my own experience as a basketball player, aim to win a championship, go to the next level, … finding the best formation was just a means to the goal.
I believe that’s the same for us, MACS is not our goal, but a strong and powerful enabler to achieve them. Having the « Why » of MACS lined up with organizational goals aims to ease its adoption in the most appropriate, purposeful and smooth way.
Talking about goals, we focus our impacts on customer, business and org/team metrics, and keep challenging ourselves to remain streamlined to improve :
- business impact by accelerating the flow of value and responsiveness to change of our hypergrowth,
- engaged and happy employees collaborating to solve complex problems,
- and team high performance.
A DIY framework
We usually love frameworks and models for the inspiration and faith in change they create. They bear catchy names, powerful concepts and associated success stories. And honestly, it usually helped a lot with the adoption of top executives, as much as it created reluctance born from preconceived opinions. The side effect is that they reveal a traditional and simplistic approach preventing us from purely embracing the complexity and unicity of human organizations and systems.
What do I mean here? They often lead us to see them as a one-size-fits-all target and then organize a roll out of a transformation plan made of concepts from others, adapted to their culture, their complexity and their system.
I believe that these models are fantastic inspirational collections of patterns bringing options to solve complex organization problems that we have, indeed, with potential similar roots. However, they are no more than a knowledge base.
We, within MACS, have a problem-driven “Shu Ha Ri” approach where :
- we assume a Shu phase to pick up patterns to try to solve our problems,
- in our Ha phase we stress the patterns to their limits and start finding alternatives,
- until, in our Ri phase, we find a more appropriate solution or we create our own.
Therefore, be ready to recognize in our first bricks of MACS, some Spotify concepts from previous experiments, some SAFe concepts (trains, PI Planning, …), some Product Management concepts, and sooner than later our own practices.
An Evolutionary framework
The Agile manifesto is introduced by the sentence « we are uncovering better ways of developing software ». Mostly ignored, but central. If we try to expand it to the whole organization, we can also read that the level of complexity of organizational shift is very high and unpredictable, regarding the number of human relationships, group dynamics and dependencies. And therefore, it’s by doing, testing, and learning that we find the best ways of working.
Our pragmatic key to organizational evolution — like any complex change — is about considering our organization as a product and then having :
- a vision that give a hint of our purpose
- learning phases where we want to maximize safe-to-fail and data-driven experimentations, concluded by feedback loop;
- and adaptation phases where we creatively and collectively try to find the best possible next experimentation to get closer to the best-suiting solution.
When we kickstarted MACS, we had multiple sources of inspiration that almost all converged to a piecemeal approach where we experiment in a small bucket of the organization and we expand it later.
However, I was not convinced that it will be a satisfying option in our case for several reasons :
- Most of our troubles were at the interfaces of teams, not visible at that time, and the lack of system mechanisms to solve them;
- The executive momentum and the fatigue of the organization has stumbled for some time on the same problems and it generated the perfect sense of urgency;
- My past experience using a piecemeal approach always led to the bias of looking for perfection during the pilot phase due to overwhelming go/no go decisions happening based on the results.
It wasn’t an easy decision to set our first round with 6 teams of teams (trains) as a whole, but it was based on a few convictions:
- Piecemeal approach will be on the experimentation, not on the scope of action;
- It won’t be possible to make it perfect, and that’s exactly what we aim for as a learning organization. Let’s then assume that it will be chaotic, safe to try, accompanied and we will learn collectively from it;
- It will be inclusive, with no one left over compared to the few selected as a pilot;
- It will target straight our core pain points about cross-teams collaboration;
- We will run 6 experiments at the same time. We should be able to accelerate our feedback loop, maximize learnings about the alternatives and make visible the dysfunctions of our system that we would have missed going one train at a time.
- This approach resonates with our company values: boldness, ingenuity and care
It was our “Shu” experimentation. You might be thinking a bold Shu, I guess you’re right and it again echoes with ManoMano “Boldness” values. There are now 8 trains covering our value streams, from different kinds inspired by the awesome book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton.
Takeaways
MACS, our framework, is born around strong principles and beliefs that guide us in any experimentation that we are running.
We work around some key concepts like transparency, collaboration, alignment, empowerment, focus, that are all ingredients of people engagement and characteristics of modern high performing organizations.
MACS is humbly and constantly exploring new ways to reach new heights. Our backlog of experimentations (dynamic reteaming, beyond tech, performance measurement, high performing collective playbook, …) is constantly fed by our inspections of the system.
In order to follow-up our story, here is list of MACS related articles:
