Tweaking the tech org
At moovel, we work in distributed and autonomous teams, with Hamburg and Berlin as our main locations in Germany, alongside a few others. Consequently, Software Engineers are spread throughout those locations. Strong and effective collaboration between our locations is our focus, therefore bringing our Software Engineers together into one place is a regular, common practice.
Usually we plan those offsites every 4–6 months in varying locations. Having all colleagues in one place and to be able to chat and discuss in person is an important aspect, especially if your main communication happens primarily digitally. The discussions and decisions resulting from an offsite ideally provide important inspiration for our teams in the following months in one way or another.
Topic Gathering
Having topics to talk about when we gather all of our colleagues in one place is of imperial importance. In order to create an agenda, we decided to gather topics from all of the participants beforehand to get a grasp of what people would like to talk about. These topics had to be related to the Tech organization itself.
The main objective was to try to understand what kinds of processes and/or practices were executed well or not so well, general company achievements and cultural aspects engineers would like to point out or speak about.
The process was as follows:
- A spreadsheet was created and shared throughout the Tech organization so people could input their topic ideas
- We conducted a session with all engineers to make sure all gathered topics are well understood. In this group session, we created smaller groups of around 4 people that could discuss and specify topics in a more detailed fashion
- After all topics were gathered, the topics were curated and grouped together to create a list of topics
The curated list of topics was then sent to the entire Tech organization before the offsite, so everyone could get acquainted with it. On the day of the offsite, the list was presented in more detail, so participants could vote on the topics that would interest them the most.
Day Breakout
After all topics were collected and curated, an agenda was set up to drive the day and the offsite’s activities. The general outline looked like:
- Morning sessions
- Introduction and Tech direction
- Presentation of curated list of topics
- Afternoon sessions
- Topic breakout sessions in smaller groups to produce actionable results
- Conclusion
- Evening socializing activities
As outlined above, we used our morning to try to propagate the general direction of our Tech organization and how we want to work from that point on, with the addition of presenting the curated list of topics previously gathered. Each topic had a responsible person to ensure that action points would follow each one of the eventual breakout sessions. As soon as the topics were presented, each participant could vote on their preferred topics using the Dot Voting Technique. For each one of the most voted topics, breakout sessions were allocated in the afternoon.
Each breakout session was moderated by its responsible person who made sure the session was documented and contained actionable conclusions. After the meeting was over, all attendants engaged in networking and socializing activities with their colleagues.
Tweaking Topics
The topics came from various backgrounds: backend engineers, frontend engineers, data scientists, business informatics, and engineering leads. Some of the topics that were discussed included backend driven mobile apps, E2E responsibilities, engineering culture, improving and consolidating operations, logging and monitoring, to name a few.
Data Strategy
At moovel (becomes REACH NOW), we gather a lot of data on a daily basis — for instance, user flows or various behaviour habits. Multiple data stakeholders decided to sit together and discuss the status quo and see if we can optimize it to provide the user, partners, and even employees with an overall better experience, while at the same time protecting the privacy of the end-user. The Data Working Group was born as a result and we are constantly investigating how to improve on this front.
Conclusion
Tweaking the Tech organization was both a great social event and a trigger for several follow up action items that are currently ongoing. Once those action items have been executed we are open to take on new topics that our engineering group comes up with, probably with yet another tweak.
Meanwhile, we are curious to know how you follow up with topics that your engineering group raises?
Written by: Nelson Oliveira, Philip Fieber, Mahmoud Sakr, Lothar Schulz
