Looking Back to Leap Forward: Reflections on Last Year’s Tech Journey
Written by: Jason Mills, Director of Engineering, TribalScale
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Reflecting on the past year, the words challenging and exciting come to mind. Building software will never be the same again. Here is a look at my learnings over the past year.
Adapting to AI Tools
Prompt Engineering: This is revolutionizing everything we do. Rather than writing user stories, we write prompts to generate user stories. Some may laugh and say “Why generate user stories when you can just generate the code?” I don’t feel we are quite at that level yet with LLM’s, but it’s getting better. However, leveraging the power of the prompt can keep consistent formats across the organization, improve efficiency, and allow us to be flexible with our story tracking software, enabling us to be adaptable to Jira, Azure Dev Ops, or any other formats our clients may like us to use. Maintaining libraries of AI prompts is here to stay, rather than maintaining the firm templates of the past.
Embracing New Technologies: The adoption of emerging technologies was not just a trend but a necessity. We integrated new tools and methodologies to stay ahead of the curve and meet the evolving demands of the market. Leveraging our partner company Senso AI to help us deliver relevant content to our slack channels, and exporting slack data from our project channels to help seed our retro boards were some of the AI improvements we made. We also migrated to an opinionated Project Tracker tool to generate better data and metrics to feed back into the business. Clean and accurate data is everything.
Adjusting Team Dynamics
Balancing Skillsets: One focus this past year was ensuring a well-balanced skillset within teams. This meant reassessing roles and responsibilities to align with project needs, and looking at more than just engineering capability, but soft skills as well. AI tools propel senior engineers into multiple tech stacks faster than ever. Versatility will be the key going forward.
Collaborative Efforts: We fostered a culture of collaboration, where ideas and solutions were freely exchanged. This approach not only improved project outcomes but also enhanced team morale. We have always embraced Extreme Programming at TribalScale and the belief in the one-week sprint. These modern ways of collaboration continue to increase our sprint velocity. We use the aid of note-taking AI plugins. Typing meeting minutes is a thing of the past when we have tools to automate. We use AI to pull out project-level concerns from Slack and bring them right into our retro board. Retros are more exciting now and more thorough.
Successes and Failures
Project Management Tools: The successful implementation of advanced tools for project budgeting and scheduling marked a significant achievement for us last year. Understanding the journey map for our team in regards to how they needed to use the tools, allowed us to see conflicting use cases by different departments. It allowed us to change the way we used the tool to make sure both departments were tracking the data correctly. Getting that clean data in place is everything.
Challenges in Skillset Balancing: As we leveraged AI and off-loaded mundane tasks to LLMs, we faced hurdles in maintaining a balanced team skillset, which sometimes led to delays in project delivery. These challenges were valuable lessons in resource management and team building. Planning for attrition and team member vacations in terms of skills was important. I still consider paired programming to be our most valuable tool. From new hire onboarding to learning new tech stacks, pairing is a key pillar at TribalScale.
Customer Feedback
Increased Feedback Frequency: Actively incorporating customer feedback into our development process enabled us to refine our products and services significantly. This approach not only met but often exceeded client expectations.
Building Stronger Client Relationships: Our direct engagement with customers strengthened our relationships and positioned us as a client-centric organization, deeply invested in delivering value. Project management is all about constant re-alignment to hit that moving target. Understanding this right from the beginning and sharing project concerns with our clients allowed us to make changes quickly rather than let things sit. When it comes to transparency, we share project trackers, retro boards, the good, the bad, and the ugly, to pivot quickly. Our clients appreciated this tremendously.
Personal Growth
Technical Skill Enhancement: Last year I focused on enhancing my technical skills, acquiring cloud certifications, and examining the imperfections in the cloud, from overloaded data centers to mismatched hardware causing software to fail unexpectedly.
Industry Knowledge Development: I also dedicated daily time to reading and listening to podcasts. I was also more active in professional communities, attending summits and conferences, and branched out to chat with my hardware friends about how their industry is reacting to the need for higher output with lower power in chip design as the need to bring AI processing to wearables becomes necessary.
Innovative Tools and Practices
Tuple for Paired Programming: Implementing Tuple transformed our paired programming process, resulting in a marked improvement in our feature development.
Transitioning to Slack Huddle: Moving from Discord to Slack Huddle for internal communications fostered a more integrated and efficient team environment.
Final Thoughts
In retrospect, the last year has been a period of significant learning and growth. Each challenge presented an opportunity to improve, and every success was a stepping stone towards greater achievements. As we kick off this new year, this is hopefully the last time I will think about 2023 and instead focus on pushing all of these learnings even further in 2024.
Jason is the Director of Engineering at TribalScale. As an experienced Engineering Leader, he has spent the last decade building high-performing product teams that embrace Extreme Programming and Lean-Agile methodologies. His goal is to continue driving innovation and excellence in engineering by leveraging his skills in leadership, technical expertise, and passion for continuous improvement.
TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!
