Letting the Teams Decide: From Scrum to Kanban
By Mike Finkel and Louise Story
A lot of things have changed since we all started working from home, but one thing we have worked hard to preserve is our culture of empowering engineering teams to be leaders in decision-making.
One recent decision by WSJ’s web team reflects our collaborative approach to decision-making and has turned out to help us a lot in the new world of ‘Work From Home’.
It was the middle of the summer when we started a dialogue around the way our web product development team works. Like some of our other teams, the web team had followed the Scrum framework for Agile development for several years. We liked many things about Scrum — it is collaborative, transparent, and it lets us stay nimble and closely tied to our business goals.
But as the team grew in both size and scope of responsibility, planning meetings were becoming unwieldy and tough to organize.
By July, engineers on the team were starting to question their practices. Why, they wondered, wait until the end of the standard two-week sprint to figure out the next thing to do? While we can come together by virtual hangout for daily standups and the other ceremonies prescribed by Scrum, synchronous meetings are not as easy as they used to be. We’ve been responsive to the realities of the pandemic — children at home, other family members with needs, logistics of daily life — and we’ve allowed alternative work schedules. Scrum planning sessions weren’t exactly designed for this.
So, the team started looking at Kanban — — a different approach to Agile.
Agile engineering — a philosophy published in the Agile Manifesto by a group of influential software engineers from across the industry 20 years ago — has led to many different approaches in the world of product development. Scrum was one of the first formalized approaches in Agile, and it focused on creating short planning cycles with regular team check-ins and retrospectives to revisit the process and continuously improve as a team. Kanban, in contrast, aims for a continuous flow where a team can constantly adjust priorities and take on new work as soon as they ship something. For the web team, the Kanban board, where the list of work and tasks is openly shared, and this process overall, are better suited for the quick-turnaround requests we often get inside of a news organization. It also happens to serve us better in this new world where our teams are highly distributed.
The Kanban board is, for some, better suited for the world of asynchronous communication.
Because we have empowered teams to define their own ways of working, this wasn’t a shift that came from the top. Instead, Vasudha Maganti, the manager on the team, researched Kanban, spoke to other managers who recently made the shift, and suggested the idea to her team through several 1:1 meetings. They all agreed that this shift would address their concerns, so they talked it over with their product and program partners.
“We wanted a simpler process that can increase our efficiency while also being flexible to changing priorities,” Ms. Maganti said. “We were doing two-week sprints previously, and we felt the existing process was too rigid. We would spend too long in planning meetings and sizing stories, and give inaccurate estimates at times, and still come out with unknowns on tasks.”
The pandemic accentuated the need for change, said Marta Jakubanis, the director of product for our web platform.
“We all wanted to cut down the noise and focus on delivering the next thing, one day at a time, rather than trying to forecast priorities for and output of our engineering team beyond a one-week horizon,” Ms. Jakubanis said.
When the team shared their plans about the shift, we asked how well this would suit their work and whether it would position the team for success. (Sometimes we can plan ahead two weeks but other times, we have a vanity url request that needs to happen that very day.). And, we asked, was this going to help our engineers do the very best work in these times we are living in?
We valued that the team had found a solution and supported them in giving it a try. After all, we aren’t trying to make teams that simply perfect the art of listening to us and other leaders — we want to create and develop teams of people who think for themselves and can communicate and develop best paths forward. As long as teams communicate well with others across engineering, product and all of our disciplines, it works just fine if the teams work a bit differently from each other across different platforms and priorities. Of course, we still have annual goals and the teams work together to plan quarterly roadmaps, but the delivery process can work in different styles in different phases of growth and phases of a team.
So how’s it going so far with Kanban?
“So far the response has been positive,” said Ms. Maganti, the web engineering manager. “They are able to deliver faster, they have fewer distractions, they are more focused and doing well overall. We are continuously evolving our processes and we make adjustments as we go.”
The team still meets on Mondays to go over any new items that have been groomed, share any updates on priorities for the week, etc., and to make sure everyone on the team has a solid, high-level idea of what’s going on. But beyond that, we encourage asynchronous communication via Slack channels, and smaller, ad hoc meetings to further dig into requirements with product and design, as needed, rather than a central grooming session.
“The new way of working has done very well for us thus far — we’re able to juggle a lot of projects at once, always a must for a team covering a portfolio as big as Web, deliver quickly on critical priorities, and still work on our larger, longer-term initiatives successfully,” Ms. Jakubanis, the product director, said. “The more ad hoc communication has also fostered an even more collaborative environment, where great product solutions come from developers and designers, not just product managers or editors. Even though it was brought upon by challenging circumstances, overall, a shift to a more Kanban-style Agile was definitely a move in the right direction for the team, given the way we work today — and it even helped make us work more cross-functionally and collaboratively in the process.”
The web team put the new ways of working to test with the election — an important newsroom event involving big web traffic — and all went well. Recently the Kanban process helped us successfully deliver on our product priorities large and small even during a record-breaking election night. We scaled out a brand new recirculation-boosting feature, in the form of a navigation ribbon. We launched new forms of LinkedIn sharing and are undertaking long-term technical infrastructure projects.
As the year ends, we’re excited our web team has delivered not only great user-facing work, but that they’ve also delivered new and flexible ways of working together.
Mike Finkel is the VP of Engineering at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones who leads the Journal’s mobile and web engineering teams as well as other key engineering areas. He is a senior leader in DXS.
Louise Story is the Chief Product and Technology Officer of The Wall Street Journal and its Chief News Strategist. She leads DXS, the Journal’s product development and content strategy unit.
