Front-End Strategy Day: How We Got Closer to What We Really Need
About two years ago our CTO asked me after his yearly management team retreat if I would be interested to become lead Front-end Engineer, or tribe lead. Which basically meant kicking off a brand-new tribe within the engineering department. At that time, there were only three (actually two and a half) Front-end Engineers working at StudyPortals including myself. The perfect moment to start establishing a Front-end Tribe in back then our 8-headed Engineering department.
The Engineering team was in the past very back-end focused and so was our code when I just started. The overall quality of our products was good but could be so much better when you looked at it from a Front-end point of view. The Front-end oriented codebase was lacking standards, a consistent user experience and overall technical innovation. This made our development process often more complex and time consuming than it needed to be.
Was it really that horrible? No, absolutely not! But it was a challenge to establish a tribe in which things needed to be more innovative and standardized. Perhaps even more than initially anticipated.
Growing a tribe
By now our Engineering team is a 36-headed centipede fully operating via the Rockefeller Habits principles in multiple product focused Scrum teams. The Front-end Tribe consists of 12 engineers, spread out over multiple product teams representing our discipline. As we have grown so fast the last couple of years we were facing with a new set of challenges that we didn’t have when we were still a whole lot smaller. So, for the last two years we have been focusing a lot on our communication, knowledge sharing, technology and vision to overcome these challenges.
Last year, our Lead UX Designer Den Tserkovnyi organized his own tribe strategy day. At that time, I didn’t really feel the need for my own strategy day so I decided to not organize one. But in 2016 I noticed that due to our extensive growth and professionalization we were facing a whole new set of challenges. Challenges mostly in the field of our infrastructure, knowledge sharing and alignment on the “way forward”.
Rhythm and routine
Every year after the management-retreat the leadership team defines and refines the yearly company goals and KPIs in our next battleplan. Based on this plan the individual departments come up with their own yearly goals and KPI’s. By making use of the Rockefeller Habits routine that is suggested by Verne Harnish we are able to optimize the cooperation and strategy between the different tribes and departments. It allows us to grow sustainable without having to compromise on cooperation and broader (tribe) alignment. As an addition to our existing alignment rhythm I decided together with the other tribe leads to plan a yearly strategy meeting as well.
Besides the (meeting) rhythm that is described above, for Front-end we also have our bi-weekly hub meetings which we use to update each other on what we are working on. We also have our daily and monthly huddles and sit together once a quarter to sharpen our strategy by refining our priorities, improve routines and talk about what could be better in our development processes.
Creating something useful
The first thing that I asked myself was: what do I want to get out of this day? The strategy day would take up an entire day with quite some people and I really wanted to get something out of the day which could be used throughout the entire year. A difficult thing since there was no plan yet…
The answer to my questions and worries was a method called the (Toyota) Improvement Kata, a method which helps you to successfully plot a course when the way forward is unclear or unknown. The Improvement Kata helps you in being lean based on a couple of steps, they are as follows:
Thijs Putman, our CTO, is a fan of the Toyota Kata approach when it comes down to establishing routine and creating focus. Based on his experience and feedback, Alexandra (my Adjutant Lead) and I came up with a format which we used during the strategy day.
The strategy day in a nutshell
We invited external stakeholders from our Dev-ops, Back-end and UX tribe to represent their discipline so that they would also be able to give feedback on whatever would be discussed during the day. Strategy meetings often tend to be boring and that is exactly what we wanted to prevent. So, for that reason I asked two of our Front-end Engineers to organize in-between activities which luckily kept the energy level good throughout the day.
We started the day with a presentation where I summarized all the accomplishments of 2016 in a nutshell. It wasn’t only good to see what we did throughout the entire year but it also helped new people to see the reasoning behind certain decisions.
After the presentation, we held a retrospective in which we reflected on everything that went well in 2016 but also on the things that can be improved. This feedback together with the input that was put on Rajesh in advance, formed the basis for the rest of the day. For the people who are thinking what? Well, Rajesh is our life-size Big Bang Theory totem which we use to gather input within the tribe throughout the entire year.
At the end of the morning we clustered and prioritized everything so we could use this input for the afternoon. We chose the four biggest clusters so we could look at the current condition and based on this could define the next target conditions. We discussed the following clusters:
- (On) page performance
- Tracking and collecting user data
- Our internal administration system
- Progressive Web Apps
The entire afternoon was reserved to discuss and present the four clusters to everyone so that at the end of the day we would have first draft of our roadmap. We discussed the clusters simultaneously in two mixed groups each consisting out of at least five people. These groups used a set of questions that Alexandra and me pre-defined based on the Kata routine. The questions were setup to make people more aware of what the current situation is and what the next target conditions could be.
I won’t go through all the questions in detail but below you can see a couple of key questions which we used to define our milestones and sub milestones:
What is the definition of awesome?
What is the added value?
What is the current condition?
What is the target condition?
How can we measure the success or failure?
After we discussed the clusters in the afternoon in groups, each group, presented their results to the others so they could understand and give input on the results as well. After processing this feedback, we finalized the roadmap together. This was a relatively short session since we already defined priority earlier that day, we only needed to make it more specific. And so, we created our first roadmap ever!
Did we got closer to what we really need?
Organizing a day like this is not only great for your strategy, rocks and KPI’s but also for your team moral if you do it right. People really enjoyed having a day in which they could share feedback and brainstorm with other experts in the field to align upon long-term vision.
We are definitely getting closer to what we really want and need as a tribe! It will be very important, especially the coming time, to make sure that we take enough time to extend the road map and to adopt it into our workflow. Just make sure that you always choose people above processes and tools, a strategy day is just a means to an end.
Yes, I would really recommend doing something similar with your team! Especially when you are struggling with determining direction, prioritizing or with making strategy insightful to others. It won’t be the holy grail but it will form a robust format to get your team started.
I hope you enjoyed reading my first article! If you have any suggestions or you just want to share your experience, do leave a comment below.
Thanks!
