Iterative Development & Relentless Delivery
Agile @ Paylocity is what I call an atypical approach to ‘popular’ Agile — one that works well for our context and the impact we want to create as an organization. At Paylocity, our singular goal is to deliver against our customers’ unmet needs. We continuously strive to create value for our customers. It is this act of ‘value creation’ that guides our practices — not the ‘popular’ belief.
“our singular goal is to deliver against our customers’ unmet needs.”
At the core of our operating model are people and culture — they are our biggest strengths. As an organization, we are very much invested in fostering an environment of learning and curiosity, where our talent can thrive and cultivate our culture. Our talent is the best and our culture complex — both better than any I have seen in my 19 years of experience in software development. Last year alone, our Product and Tech team delivered more than 250 feature releases. Check out this short video showcasing some of the new and cool features. This wasn’t an easy feat — think 35+ teams working together, iterating on ideas and putting them in front of stakeholders and customers early and often. Then collecting feedback and going through that whole cycle again and again — relentlessly. It was certainly challenging, sometimes difficult and heck of a lot of fun.
Our product development teams are typically between eight and 12 people who operate as self-organizing units with guidance, collaboration and support from various parts of the organization. Each of these teams have both long-term goals that relate to organizational mission and short-term internal goals that relate to the features and initiatives. Each team has the autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it and how to work together. This autonomy, however, is not absolute — we have practices in place that allow for the decisions that the teams take to align with the overall product strategy and organizational goals. We believe in low-intensity, high-frequency feedback cycles and our alignment and collaboration routines are grounded in that belief.
“we have practices in place that allow for the decisions that the teams take to align with the overall product strategy and organizational goals.”
These feedback cycles influence each teams’ roadmap with features and technical enablers. With the product owner’s guidance on priority, the team collaborates on how to sequence the backlog items and how to iteratively deliver value through the upcoming sprints. The team then iterates on their backlog typically on a two-week cadence, sometimes on a weekly cadence — depending on the team’s context. At the end of each cadence, the team demonstrates working code to collect feedback from internal stakeholders. That feedback guides the team’s decision on whether to iterate further or to put the change in front of our customers. The team’s work doesn’t stop there — they eagerly and intently monitor how our customers are interacting with the changes they just introduced — take that feedback and build that feedback back into their backlog. And this cycle of decisions, actions, feedback and results continues. At the end of the quarter, it is time to pause a bit to assess how we are doing and realign our paths.
Good enough is not enough for us. We push ourselves to ask the hard questions. We push ourselves to engage in a healthy debate on what is best for our customers. We push ourselves to achieve more and find ways to constantly improve and evolve our products, services, operating processes and our environment as a whole. We let our principles guide our decisions and our mission guide our actions.
