5 Reasons I Love My Team at ServiceRocket
Before joining ServiceRocket, I was in a local start-up company that pretty much handle every project from end to end by myself. Yes, you heard it right, “all by myself”. Back then the start-up company only has 2 persons: me and the founder.
After 3 years of staying there and observing the ups and downs of the company, both of us know that we need to improve on something. But we are too busy dealing with our daily operations and there is no clear picture of what needs to be improved.
In the end, I decided to part ways because the company's direction does not align with my personal goals anymore. After that I spent 2 months interviewing with more than 20 companies to find the right manager as my role model, eventually, I found the right one in ServiceRocket.
As of today, I’ve already worked in ServiceRocket for a year and I would like to share with you 5 reasons why I love my team so much.
1. Rituals
The team has been operating effectively simply with just these 3 rituals:
Sprint Planning
We will have a sprint planning session at the start of the week, during this meeting usually our project manager will define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved and also prioritize each ticket so that engineers can work according to the product roadmap. However, all of the engineers will also raise their concerns, questions, and suggestions for each task that we are going to commit, so that we can align everyone’s thoughts and avoid miscommunication.
Sprint Review
This meeting is conducted at the end of the sprint right before the sprint retrospective, the agenda for this meeting is to do a live stream to show the whole organization what the team has done during this sprint.
Sprint Retrospective
To end the sprint, we will do a retrospective for the sprint to discuss everything that happened in the sprint, for example, areas of improvement, what went well in the sprint, what are the future action points, self-reflection, shoutouts to someone, and many more.
2. Sparring and Discovery
We work closely with designers and product managers to prioritize our products’ user friendliness along with the involvement of brainstorming and sparring sessions, we are able to identify potential problems and limitations before implementation starts. This allows us to quickly adapt to the changes and reiterate to improve the product quickly.
3. Common Sense
We believe good practices will eventually lead to a quality product. Hence, we are having some good practices as the team’s common sense to serve as guidance on our coding. Some of our team’s common sense is as below:
- Only start the ticket, if it is well-groomed.
- Coding style guidance.
- Code review process, as always get at least 2 team members’ approval.
- Product UAT before the final deployment kicks start.
- Everyone in the team practices “Talk Straight”, we don’t hide when we see something wrong.
- And the list keeps going on…
4. Team Diversity
Our team includes 6 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 product designer, and 1 engineering lead. Our job scope for each role is very clear, we can fully focus on our strengths to deliver quality work. Even though it is a small team but is intact for the team to produce excellent output, and the workload is distributed perfectly. We also fully utilized our company core value “Think Team” as if one has failed all of us failed, so we grow together even faster.
5. Learning in Play Day
As we all know technology keeps evolving, and we try to learn new things every week to make sure that we continue to grow. As the saying goes “Sharing is caring”, we do embrace the company value “Share the Knowledge” to share whatever we’ve learned during Play Day to make sure that we help each other to stay competitive.
Conclusion
There is no perfect team structure but I do embrace the above practices to deliver quality products and services, it is tailored for the team based on actual needs and through continuous experiments. The team structure can also evolve to adapt to business needs and changes in the surrounding environment. Most importantly, I learn new knowledge every week to keep myself competitive and out of my comfort zone.
