Scaling an Organization Designed to Learn
QuizUp recently celebrated its second anniversary. Well, to be frank, we didn’t celebrate. We forgot. We do make sure to celebrate victories, milestones, and all the important things. However, just adding another year to our timeline is not something we glorify. It did, however, remind us to look back and reflect on our journey.
“The past two years have been epic. We are not only building the QuizUp community. We are simultaneously designing an amazing organization.”
I wanted to write this blog to offer an overview of the QuizUp Organization and open up a dialog about what we can do better. Each following blog will dig into some of the areas mentioned here for more details, examples, and guides. Feel free to comment on certain areas, and we’ll bump them up our blog backlog! Our goal is to synthesize our learnings, share our findings, and, most importantly, improve with feedback from others walking the same path.
We hope you enjoy!
A rundown of the QuizUp organization
“We’ve grown from a team of a dozen to 90 people and seen our share of growing pains and joys.”
QuizUp has gone through a few different iterations of our organizational structure during the last two years. Looking back at some of the more notable “we need this quick” projects that we’ve done in the past, they’ve all had one thing in common; we’ve assembled a small tactical team to deal with it immediately. We’ve done this many times, mostly when we’re under some hacker attacks or external pressure. Small teams don’t have the same communication and collaboration overhead as their larger counterparts. The division of work becomes very clear, and the sense that everything you do has a huge impact on output.
Teams at QuizUp
“We have an enormous trust in small, autonomous teams with a clear purpose.”
Our teams are “fully stacked, but not more.” That is a phrase we use to indicate that our teams should have all the skill-sets required to deliver on their opportunities. We also try our best to keep teams as small as possible to save them from internal communication overheads. Most of our teams have one of each discipline, i.e. iOS, Android, and server and sometimes two if the task requires it, or we see the need to pair more senior people with new members during their initial onboarding.
Opportunities that capture value for our users unites our teams. We want everyone to have a very clear purpose for getting out of bed each morning, and everyone should know how their daily tasks link to our broader vision. QuizUp exists to connect people with shared interests. We support this with iterative and incremental development, taking small slices of features, improvements, and initiatives at a time.
Opportunities are defined through analysis of our users’ needs, our team member insights, this provides clear guidance for the purpose of each team. We also like to see autonomy in both decision making and the execution. Each team figures out how to achieve their purpose best, sets their goals, creates processes and delivers as they see fit.
It’s also worth noting that everyone belongs to a team, even our kitchen staff forms Team Gourmet and follow some of the same formats as our engineering teams, i.e. do retrospectives and have an agile coach.
Roles at QuizUp
“Some team members take on additional roles to foster our organization building.”
Our organization is quite flat. We don’t use leveling per se, but we do have four “hats” that come with additional responsibilities.
Team leads make sure to be on top of individuals’ health within our organization. They do regular one-on-ones to foster personal growth and make sure that everyone is doing well, in every aspect of the verb.
Heads of discipline at QuizUp focus on the mastery of the craft. They facilitate knowledge sharing and work with other members of their discipline to develop the skills needed to flourish in their field.
We have dedicated product managers who organize and facilitate product workshops with our stakeholders and prioritize the conversations needed to move our product further. PMs are a new addition to our organization, so we’re still evolving their roles and responsibilities.
Agile coaches facilitate continuous improvements to our processes. They listen carefully to the needs of our teams and help them organize their learnings through retrospectives and various initiatives.
Meetings at QuizUp
“We HATE meetings, but we LOVE Dailies, Tacticals, Opp Walks, Retros, Friday Feelings, Planning, Manias, 1:1s, Demos, ReadUps and All Hands.”
Everyone loathes unstructured meetings with no clear agenda. Meetings can be a destructive force that drains energy and wastes time.
At QuizUp, we “don’t have any meetings”; well, we have a ton of them, but each one is structured, facilitated, and properly branded. We try our best to follow a recipe of a well-formulated meetings. I am probably missing a few, but here are the top eleven meetings at QuizUp:
- First, and most often, is the daily standup. We’re by the book here, so nothing new.
- The Weekly Tactical is a brief run-through of progress, plans, and problems between each one of our fourteen teams and the leadership. This fast-paced meeting consumes our Mondays. This means that every single team gets an opportunity to demonstrate what is being worked on, what is in the past and raise important issues. These meetings are both strategic, tactical and foster great closeness between individual teams and the leadership.
- The Opp Walks act as a communications layer between our teams. We have a big board that lists all active opportunities and walk through each one. This one is similar to a Scrum of Scrums.
- Retrospectives are probably the single most important meeting recipe we have. They are usually theme-based, such as “Highlights, Lowlights, and No Lights”, or “Stop, Start, Continue”. And we’ve been experimenting with short mindfulness exercises during these meetings.
- Our beloved Friday Feelings. If anything deserves a separate blog, it’s this one. This has been created to open up our feelings, to reveal our vulnerability, provide a venue of support and facilitate the building of trust. Everyone shares feelings associated with the four core emotions: mad, glad, sad, and afraid.
- We have planning meetings. Planning is an area we are actively trying to become better at managing.
- Our Manias are hilarious. We have a unique group of witty people on our Community team. During their Mania Meetings, they swarm on certain areas with their creative genius to make everything more entertaining.
- We have one-on-ones, which supports our personal growth.
- Our Demos, which champion the “show and tell” mentality are a big favorite. We invite everyone and get a lot of great feedback.
- To accelerate learning we have regular ReadUps, which are basically book clubs, but for academic papers.
- Finally, we have the Town Hall. This is the crown jewels. Our CEO is a fantastic motivator through his lively presentations. Our almost-monthly Town Hall sets the direction and drives alignment throughout the organization.
In addition to these eleven finely honed meetings, we have a few others that we have not gotten around to structuring and branding. We have many workshops, we have leadership meetings, and our disciplines have their meetings. Perhaps someday we’ll be able to get all of them into a nice format.
Tools at QuizUp
“A few notes on the tools that help bind everything together.”
Our teams have autonomy to create their work systems. Every single team has chosen to use Post-it notes and whiteboards to visualize their work. Some use these for an overview of their backlog, and others have implemented a Kanban style workflow for their tasks.
We use Asana for tasks, updates, and conversations related to those tasks and updates. We also use Slack for real-time communications. Of course, we don’t use email at all, perhaps only for sending out meeting invites.
This is QuizUp
“We are still young and have a lot to learn.”
This was a very high-level overview of the QuizUp organization at the moment. We have been going through a lot of rapid changes, and will continue to do so. Heck, we even version control our organization chart to keep everyone up to date… we are at version 5.3 if you were wondering.
Thanks for reading — I would love to hear your feedback!
