How we designed Snook’s software team
Last year I changed roles at Snook to become Tech Lead. I have a hybrid skillset, with a background in strategic design and an MSc in Computer Science; where I focused on machine learning. I now head up our growing team of software developers and interaction designers.
When the team was forming we locked ourselves away in a room for a day to align and articulate our ambitions and ways of working.
Building a team can be complex and messy. Particularly when you are bringing a new capability into a company. I wanted to share the approach we took in the hope it might be helpful to others setting up a new team.
1. Start with a shared vision
Snook’s vision is a more human world, where people and planet thrive together. Our vision is Snook’s vision. If we defined our own vision, we risk travelling in some other direction and being less effective as a result. The question for us is, what does a more human world look like from a software perspective?
2. Define your purpose
Your purpose describes the unique value you bring both inside and outside your organisation. Organise your team’s efforts around your purpose. Our purpose as a team is to ‘make it real’. We have new skills that Snook didn’t have before. Working together we can rapidly research, design, build and ship real-world products and services. We’ll be doing this with our clients but also building our own ventures and tools. I’ll give you a teaser intro to our first product later in this post.
3. Craft just three principles
Principles are what guide our decisions and actions as a team day-to-day. They function as a yardstick by which to measure our work, improve our ways of working and keep the focus on what matters.
We have just three principles for now. As our team and capabilities grow, the current ones might change or new ones may be added.
We could have opted for standard-issue software team metrics like scalability, resilience, reliability, performance and so on. But in our conversations, we really wanted to question why. Why are these features of software design important? Who do they serve? What is the underlying reason why you would want ‘reliability’ in a system?
Principle 1: Universal Access
We design and build technology that everyone can use. We care deeply about accessibility and equality of access. The work we create should actively include people that find it hard to use technology. That could be because they have a visual impairment, low literacy levels or can’t afford devices or data.
Principle 2: Delightfully useful
Our work is useful, usable and aligned to user goals. But beyond utility, we build things that bring delight into people’s lives and help them thrive. We test our ideas regularly with real users and prioritise user feedback over client feedback. We take expert care with analytics to prove value and support continual improvement.
Principle 3: Radically adaptive
We respond quickly to people’s emerging needs and a world in flux. We choose tools and methods that help us design and build technology for change.
“We should be able to mock up a concept in the morning and be ready to test it in the afternoon” — Adam Parsons, Interaction Designer, Snook
4. Describe your principles in practice
Translate your principles into ‘strategies’, the ways you work day-to-day that help you live by your principles, purpose and vision. I was deeply inspired by Anna Shipman’s notes on strategy from a conversation with Russell Davies. It has served as a helpful guide for my thinking as we were shaping the team. One thing that really stood out to me was “the most important role of a strategy is to tell us what we are not going to do”.
Agile but not dogmatic
A lot of software teams can be dogmatically agile or not agile at all. Fundamentally, we believe in the 12 principles laid out in the agile manifesto above any flavour of agile like ‘Scrum’ or ‘XP’. We prototype and test ideas early and often with people to continually learn about their needs and what works.
Human-centred
We are embedded in research and design and have research and design embedded in software development.
Built on world-class software practices
We get to build on decades of trial and error in software design and delivery. This means using and building tools that help us work faster and smarter. We invest effort in testing, automation and DevOps so we can focus on delivering value. We are a learning team and make time to study, teach and practice, old and new skills and concepts.
5. Take your strategy for a test drive
All of this means nothing without practice and application.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker.
We tested our ways of working by taking an idea from a blank page to minimum viable product (MVP) in a month.
Our first product is a web app to simplify getting informed consent in user research. We’ll be piloting it in our projects in early 2020 and exploring how we could offer it to other companies in the future.
This project allowed us to rapid prototype, test and improve our ways of working. We have already made huge progress even in the few months the team has been up and running.
The kind of work that excites us
Put simply, we want to deliver products and services that are accessible, inclusive, useful, delightful and capable of adapting to people’s needs and a world in flux.
Our team works together by using the best bits of agile, human-centred design and world-class software practices. If that sounds interesting, whether you are a client with a big idea or interested in joining Snook, we’d love to chat.
Credit and thanks to Alex Reece for input and advice on building a team with a brand focus.
