Tech Nottingham Jan 2019: Innovation And A Retro
Building Innovative Teams, Products And Company Culture - by Chris Winfield
In tech we’re tasked with creating new and innovative solutions, but it can be hard to be creative on demand when faced with the pressures of handling feature requests, maintaining legacy solutions and fixing bugs. How can we be proactive rather than reactive, and turn ideas into products that will provide years of growth?
In this talk we’ll look at how giving teams a real sense of ownership, avoiding hard deadlines and focusing on a rapid release cycle can foster a no-nonsense innovation culture in companies of all sizes, from startups to large PLCs.
Chris talked about working for Postcode Anywhere (as the name suggests, a postcode lookup service) before moving onto his start up company called Swift Complete who create automated property listings and soon also turning sketches into home floor plans.
He described working for Postcode Anywhere and seeing the increase in usage of the service as the company grew, 10 billion lookups per year and a service which is accessed 15,000 times a second are impressive numbers!
The culture he had put into place in his Swift Complete start up has guiding principles of customer driven development but also innovation lead (don’t wait for bug of feature requests). There is a focus on what has already been delivered rather than what could be delivered or is on the roadmap. Ideas are also considered more valuable than code as it’s likely that systems will be replaced quickly. No documentation is controversial but possible if the code base if fresh, one of the benefits of not having legacy systems and a legacy code base to support.
A careful choice of software language and hardware makes it easier to pivot and grow, it also fosters an innovation culture. This echos some of the earlier talks at Tech Nottingham regarding Lean Startup methods. Having a long term product vision coupled with frequent software releases is more important than setting specific time boxes for features. The product vision is kept fresh by having code jams or challenge sessions or kick off sessions to refocus.
Chris also talked about communicating the content of software releases by having a before and after stand up meeting to show what has changed and indicate progress. Feature request alerts to the customers submitting the request in the first place is an interesting idea, particularly if it’s possible to get quick feedback from the customer. He also described creating short summaries of each release (in non technical terms) which could be used by customer facing departments to describe what has just changed.
Tech Nottingham Retro - An Agile Retrospective
The retrospective is one of the most important elements of any Agile development process, it is a mechanism for celebrating successes, acknowledging failures and then improving and optimising.
We will demonstrate the power of the retrospective by running a retro session on Tech Nottingham as an event.
As an outcome we’ll all get to experience and participate in the retrospective session and we’ll all get to work together to make Tech Nottingham a better event.
I’ve attended a lot of Agile Retro sessions although I haven’t attended one with so many people since Programme Increment Planning Retros where there were multiple teams.
The retro was a little rushed but it was interesting to see the range of comments from people about their favourite sessions and the expected comments about the shortage of food!