Agile at ManoMano, we do our MACS — Part 2

After having introduced you to our MACS framework with this article, this new one aims to deep dive into a few patterns that we have played with and the on-going or our next experimentations.

I also want to take advantage of this article to share some observed insights for the 1st ManoBirthday of our MACS framework.

Patterns at the heart of MACS

Following our MACS principles explained in the part 1, patterns are the results of our experimentations that we consider bringing sufficient value at the current time.

Strategic alignment

One of the main expected outcomes of building MACS was to experiment how to align and connect ManoMano strategy at all levels of the company while living in a super dynamic environment.

Our hypergrowth context makes it very critical to have a way to engage and align our teams towards inspirational goals and at the same time allow us to pivot a small or important part of the company, seamlessly. We have decided after 3 quarters to try to set an OKR system (Objective and Key Results) from teams up to company-wide.

Let’s not re-explain what OKRs are, others made it so well that a google search will help you more (or directly with the book: Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr).

OKRs within MACS include a number of rules, events and tooling which help our teams prioritize, align, and measure the outcome of their efforts. OKR helps us bridge the gap between strategy and execution (from Strategic OKRs at company level to Team OKRs) and move from an output-based to an outcome-based approach to work.

OKRs — and more precisely the Strategic OKR level where executives collaborate, are also our way to decentralize the portfolio management within the teams of teams where business and tech folks are empowered to make 80/90% of the arbitration. No layers for now, we have a strong collaboration business/tech within the train that allow to make the best decisions possible.

We will spend more time very soon giving you insight about our use of OKRs. A first one is already live about our learnings of the last 6 months in a later blog post.

Tribal sense of belonging

First, with MACS, we set Teams of Teams (called Trains, inspired by SAFe, or Tribe from Spotify and more globally from : Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex by Gen. Stanley McChrystal) to balance single team autonomy and cross-team alignment towards the same mission, supporting :

• A value stream, serving a persona;
• A complex subsystem;
• A platform.

To promote that way of thinking, we did support moving the individual sense of belonging from team level to team of teams level. Meaning, reaching a wider purpose — and a higher value — but also recreating a new form of empowerment at both levels. This is our “SHU” step.

To help bring this shared purpose, vision, mission at both levels, we have a cross-functional core team, including Business Leader, Head of Product, Head of Engineering, Agile Delivery Leader, leading the train. This small group is supported by a Train leadership team involving the Lead QA Engineer, Lead UX designer, Solution architect, and Lead SRE.

We consider the sense of belonging as one of the most important patterns in our scale-up context where the organization is often changing as we are adding new people, new teams, new products, new objectives… It will surely be a standalone blog post in the future.

Highly collaborative

Inspired by big room planning concepts like the PI Planning but not only, each quarter, we organize a 2-day planning event with the 8 teams of teams at the same time, in remote or hybrid mode, supported by an intensive usage of Miro.

It brings energy, inspiration, and dedication to solve problems that should have taken months to collectively find solutions to our future massive challenges.

As Agilists, we are often asked to facilitate discussions and decisions. When going at such a scale, the way to do it changes and requires special skills of group dynamics. Keeping them efficient while creating new habits of collaboration inside the company is essential. Transparency is one of the key enabler and is at any step of this collaborative approach :

• At the the beginning, with super transparent message from our top leaders to set transparently the context and enable empowerment,
• to teamwork, where we ask for being transparent and honest about the roadmaps, what’s working, not working, not clear, not fitting with the capacity, etc. to make sure that the overall system has all the constraints to adapt and find best options.

This way, we want to create a sense of involvement whoever you are from Software Engineers to Product Managers, where you have the maximum informations from the context to be empower to make the best decisions. It helps to break down silos kept by the information segmentation and therefore to accelerate value and impact generation towards our customers and sellers.

We aim to ease the multiple trade offs that need to happen, because all of the participants see the stakes at company, or team of teams, or team level.

First insightful results

Collaboration takes time but accelerates value!

It was a massive expectation, not easy to measure, however, we have observed several interesting signs that confirm the improvement:

• Work across teams and functions are fluids;
• Co-creation starts to be natural for complex topics;
• Teams started to focus more on outcomes (part of their OKR) and less on outputs (following their plans);
• Team interdependencies are now visible and handled, we start now to reduce them as much as possible.
• Transversal and complex topics are now managed and ready for success.

Collaboration can be seen as taking time and this feedback that we have received a lot is not easy to deal with. And there is a clear lesson learnt behind that I underestimated, about managing expectations regarding the time consumption of the collaboration. The interesting thing is about choosing when you are putting your effort :

1. Either at the beginning to co-create/align and then the adoption by the involved people will be simpler;
2. The decision is fast by taking shortcuts and adoption is hard and long, and at some point, a rework is needed when a one-sided solution doesn’t adapt to a complex context.

No surprise here, you can easily imagine that the co-creation is our favorite in our complex system. This option 1 becomes more and more the norm and we observed a decrease of decision adoption lead time.

Trust thanks to predictability

We moved from a not that measured 50–60% predictability to 70–80% meaning that our set OKRs are reached in 70–80% of the cases. Let’s say it now, we are not looking for 100%.

I heard often that predictability is killing speed and of course the extreme quest of predictability kills speed. However, my strong belief is that the lack of predictability degrades trust that kills performance and therefore speed (for instance, the lack of trust forces most of the time organizations to ask for more reporting).

It’s about finding the sweet spot between predictability and speed, one without the others might be at one point dangerous!

Transparent and purposeful OKR drives impact!

Current research shows that when comparing groups of employees who used OKR against those that didn’t, the former proved much more effective at their jobs, resulting in better performance and increased sales.

Our implementation is yet too fresh to bring real facts backing this research. However, we already observed real benefits that include an understanding of the big picture, a better focus on results that matter (outcomes and impacts), increased transparency, and better (strategic) alignment. More outcomes with less outputs is our objectives and one of the metric that we try to follow.

Introducing the OKRs at all level was also a way to pursue the cultural shift from output to outcomes while not overloading by any kind of layers the organization. This helps set a boundary that protects the team from behind under solution-driven command and control (also called the famous software factory) while creating a space for problem solving empowerment.

More globally, it’s about strengthening our product culture by injecting mindset and practices within the entire company, starting by the C-level and their strategic OKRs.

Our ongoing experimentations

As of today, the experiments we have in our backlog on MACS are focusing on:

• Explore what Dynamic reteaming from Heidi Helfand, fluid teams, impact teams can bring to us. An experiment inside the Agile team is in progress and is already super valuable.
• Define an approach (assessment, playbook, …) to accelerate from forming to high performing of a team or team of teams with a specific focus on technical excellence
• Crack the Performance Management topic thanks to data driven engineering tools.
• Explore and define a top notch product framework, from Company vision to Impact monitoring, going through a Product portfolio above train level, concepts of Bets serving OKRs, …
• Grouping Agile team, Software Quality team and Software Craftsmanship team to have a greater impact serving our tech (product, data, engineering and platform) community
• And surely way more to come but also to share with you!

Takeaways

Continuously evolving, our framework is made of SHU-HA-RI phases that help us navigate our organizational pain points with boldness and ingenuity to launch experimentations and find the most appropriate answer. We don’t have a target model meaning that we have the freedom to drop any practices when they are not working anymore. Our ManoMano one is following our scale up and solving our problems as fast as we can.

Sharing, learning and improving are at the heart of what we do, including being here on our medium, to collect your feedback and perspectives. It will be very much appreciated.

In order to follow-up our story, here is list of MACS related articles:

• Part 1 about MACS, its context, and guiding principles
• Learnings after 6 months using our OKRs Framework
• Merging OKR concept on our PI Planning event

Stay tuned on this Medium to follow our further experimentations or see you on our ManoMano website!