Street Con: Technical Collaboration in a Rapidly Growing Business
It was a typical Wednesday afternoon at the office. I’d just finished running a refinement session with one of the development teams, and my mind had drifted back to the problem of the morning. The team was unhappy with our current solution to generating PDFs containing PNGs. It was too slow at scale, and was causing problems for our users. We needed a replacement. I turn on the coffee machine, and set about making a cappuccino, when Sam walks past.
Sam is the Tech Lead for another product, the Street CRM team. We have a quick chat about how the day is going, as we do, when Sam mentions he’s struggling with a problem. His team was trying to generate PDF documents using images. The exact same problem facing my team. I rush out of the kitchen to grab the Tech Leads for our product Spectre, Ed and Gerry. We go over what options each team has explored so far, and what we recommend. It was a very useful 15 minutes, and represents one of the biggest challenges for large development teams. How do you keep all the teams in the loop with what technology the other teams are exploring.
At Street Group, we try a few different methods of doing this. We have weekly All Hands meetings where teams can show off the work they’ve done over the last sprint. We have Cross-Team Technical Chapters that explore common approaches to common problems, like a Front-End Testing framework. But, by a country mile, everybody’s favourite solution is Street Con.
What is Street Con?
“The engineering department has grown rapidly in the last 12 months, we had a concern that as we continued to grow, a chasm could appear between the teams. We wanted to encourage a stronger sense of camaraderie across the departments. Each product and team should complement the other. That’s how we can innovate.
The plan for Street Con was to have a day to get everyone into the office, so we could make space and time to get to know each other better with the aim to unify the teams. We would have a few short talks, workshops, show and tell sessions and activities throughout the day. Each of the teams would facilitate a session, each taking a 30 minute slot — taking no more than 20 minutes for the talk, allowing 10 minutes of Q&A. The sessions allowed us to get much more technical than we would normally in meetings with the rest of the business. This allowed us to dive deeper into the technical details, in an encouraging and collaborative way.”
James Wade, Head of Engineering
What did we talk about?
The sessions covered all aspects of the technical teams, with input coming from all departments. Some provided information about projects that the team had been working on, such as discussing the architecture of our data collection. Some talks had a business and culture angle, such as strategy for approaching interviews. Others discussed technical approaches and strategies that had been taken, such as a discussion over implementing Domain-Driven-Design.
“I did a talk on “Better Software Design through Unit Testing”. It was about writing unit tests for classes and checking whether or not they’re easy to test. If they’re not, start looking at ways to make the class easier to test, through applying single responsibility principle, separation of concerns, etc.”
Ed Paulauskas, Tech Lead
“We played a coin game to show how batch sizes change the flow of work delivered, and spark some hopefully interesting chats about lean principles. I really loved seeing all the different topics people talked about — from interviewing to Domain-Driven Design to testing. Was really lovely to get some time in-person with a large chunk of the department as well, and to get a chance to sit down and chat with other teams.”
Chris Grice, Head of Engineering
Outcomes
The reaction to Street Con was universally positive. It has led to innovation that wouldn’t have happened without it. An example of this was the Domain-Driven-Design talk. After one team pioneered implementation of DDD in one product, this allowed the other product to learn many of the lessons learned. It’s been a frequent topic of conversation between the different teams, and has brought the teams closer together. There has been much more interaction and collaboration between all the teams after Street Con. It’s been frequently discussed whenever we get together, and the whole team is excited for the next one!
