Record-time feature building: AI Time Machine™ (Part 2)
In part 1 of this series, I’ve covered the major technology and development practices that enabled MyHeritage to develop AI Time Machine™ in record time.
In this part, I will continue by describing the mindset factors that were one of the major contributors to the high velocity:
1. Agile and lean — being agile is so much more than daily meetings, sprint planning, and yada yada ceremonies. It’s about cooperation, communication, and quick cycles that provide the most important value to the customer.
Agile teams at MyHeritage take the concept of self-contained team to the next level by having (almost) all disciplines working together: developers, QA, product, design, translations managers, DevOps engineers and business analysts.
As part of the extremely short development cycle and the need to release early, the teams gathered together to decide on the leanest functionality and on the most suitable design that reuses existing UI components and back-end services. They made reasonable compromises on functionality (without compromising on quality) when needed.
2. Flexibility — One of the most important values for R&D is flexibility. But what does this mean in practice and how is it related to quick development?
So in most development cycles we work in our own variant of Agile; we call it “Guilds and Bands”. However, from the very first moment when AI Time Machine™ was discussed, we realized that we couldn’t execute this project using the regular cycle. Unlike regular sprints, we started the development alongside the development of the UI/UX and without specifications or user stories, knowing that many questions would need to be addressed ad-hoc.
We realized that we needed several teams to work on the feature and developed a mechanism to facilitate this: an internal sync for original agile teams followed by a larger forum meeting to discuss and resolve dependencies, integration points and the goal for the specific day. We shared the same “all-hands” Slack channel for updating and set ad-hoc meetings to remove obstacles and dependencies.
Being able to make such a significant transition in our normal workflow in no time is part of the mindset that made the difference.
3. Collective ownership — Collective ownership, a key value in R&D, always plays a significant role in our ability to move fast. When the time is short, the feeling that all of us are in this together — and by all of us, I mean all departments — sharpens the need for everyone to take even more responsibility than during business as usual. This includes everyone from developers that provision cloud resources to employees that assist testing and R&D managers that make product decisions.
Having everyone on board and working with the teams and supporting them is a great energy booster that accelerates the development cycles and overcomes all obstacles we encounter.
4. Transparency — from day one of AI Time Machine™ (probably the feature didn’t have a name in day one :)) the importance of releasing the feature early was communicated by top management and was clear to everyone. We knew we had something with viral potential and that time is critical. The transparent communication regarding the importance for the business and for the MyHeritage brand set everyone’s mindset in the right direction.
5. Yes we can! (credits on the slogan to Barack Obama) — the most important factor is the belief of the team that we can actually finish the development in one week. For several minutes, a few team members thought that I might have lost my mind, but right afterwards everyone rolled up their sleeves and started making a concrete plan and executing it to actually make it happen. The great attitude of the team certainly made it possible!
I hope you find this blog post interesting! Stay tuned for part 3, the last one in this series.
