lessons of a shattered engineering organization
unmanaging change, part 3 of 3
A full month into Yammer’s crazy experiment, right as the rest of the company was about to dive in head first, it was time to take stock. What had worked? What hadn’t?
The following is a summation of a talk I gave at our Engineering all-hands “NOSCRUM”.
What was the point of all this?
I broke the goals of the experiment down to these four:
- Ship a shitload of impactful and high quality stuff
- Maximize personal ownership & accountability
- Destroy boundaries of team/geo
- Ignore established good ideas, which had become informal rules
Most importantly, get everyone out of their comfort zone. If everyone was comfortable, we weren’t changing enough
So I did my best to push the limits.
What did we do?
I classify our experiments into two buckets, with pretty different results: Self Determination and Self Organization. The team both chose what we would work on and how to work on it.
Self Determination, which the two previous blog posts covered in depth, was a huge success. The team was aligned, interested, and has produced amazing work.
Self Organization, the selection of teams and process, hit some snags. There are a lot of good ideas and experience that have gone into the selection and organization of teams at Yammer. But I was thrilled to see the teams play with the process and learn some of these lessons on their own.
What did we learn?
A selection of the findings we will be taking forward in the reboot of our initiative.
- Hack Day team selection—I offered to break the team up evenly, but they elected to choose teams on their own. Clique-ishness is a natural human tendency and that’s what we observed, people working with the people they were comfortable with.
- Project team selection—this is something engineering management did very intentionally in the old system to mix engineers with different skill levels and make sure teams don’t work together too often. We learned our lesson from Hack Day, so I took a little heavier hand in mixing up the project teams.
- Initiative weeklies—we started the initiative with bi-weekly all-hands meetings. It’s hard to get 20+ people to show up for a meeting, even the 10 minute ones I’m famous for. It quickly became the Drew broadcast meeting, so we moved the conversation to Yammer.
- Team weeklies—conversely, some of the teams started without project team weekly meetings. It was hard for those teams to keep on top of what was happening week-to-week.
- Status communication—status communication fell away with the full initiative weeklies, so some cross team visibility was lost. We brought this back by starting an initiative status thread every Monday.
- One person team — our mantra is 2-10 engineers for 2-10 weeks. Our experience is that one person teams projects can drag as engineers rathole themselves. This project seems okay, but too early to say this is a pattern.
- No Tech Lead — the choice of Tech Lead, a negotiator of MVP, a project manager who has some skin in the game coding, is a key part of team selection. One team chose not to have a Tech Lead. I don’t believe this hurt their execution, but it hurt my visibility into that team. I felt like I was harassing individual engineers.
But those are all my observations, let’s see what the team thought:
Act 6 — Denouement
Five weeks later, we have two projects in production, and three in staging about to ship. And the projects aren’t lightweights, some meaty work has been done in the four weeks of real project work.
All remaining initiatives kicked off this week and last. Predictably, they all blew up a little as everyone found their own footing and struggled in their own way, but then something magical happened, people got really goddamn excited.
“I cannot fucking express how happy I am about initiatives. It’s *really* cool to be part of the product design process again. It reminds me a lot of when I first started at Yammer.”
From one of our Yammer North (historically Microsoft) colleagues:
“I’ve learned so much and I really feel like I work for a startup now.”
Will it pay off? Only time will tell. At this point, it feels like we’ve done something really valuable here and I’m just as excited as I was when I dashed out that first blog post at 1 AM.
Going into last week, there was only one thing left for me to do. People managers, like myself, are not meant to own initiatives. Our team kicked off again last week right along with the rest of the initiatives, but this time Christina Lucey was at the helm. She’s doing a great job and, of course, way out of her comfort zone.
As for me? Well, we’re short on design and that’s my latent Superpower, so…….
If this sounds interesting to you, check out our jobs.
You can find more of my writing on Product Management on Quora or follow me on Twitter @drewdil.
