Slides from November's Agile Welly meetup: http://www.meetup.com/AgileWelly/events/216188702/ Over the last two years Powershop has grown from 10 developers and two testers to a technical team of 40. We used to work as 10 separate development silos delivering work to a separate test team. Now we have small, integrated and engaged multi-disciplinary teams of development, test, design and product ownership. We’ll talk about the changes we’ve made to get here, what we did well and what went wrong. And most importantly what we’ve learned about growth through learning and teaching. Presenters: Andy Newport - Software Development Manager at Powershop @newportandy Brian Bannister - CTO at Powershop @nz_brian

1. What we’ve learned about learning
Agile Welly
November 2014
Brian Bannister & Andy Newport

2. Brian Bannister
@nz_brian
brian@powershop.co.nz
Andy Newport
@newportandy
andy.newport@powershop.co.nz

3. What are we talking about?
How we’ve grown the Powershop delivery team, when we
never have enough people who know anything:
Growth
Integration
Learning culture

4. Small start - January 2013
10 Developers
Culture shock
Complex business domain
Hard - morale
Hard - build up the junior members
Hard - integrate and make it fun

5. Struggle - January to May 2013
Separate development team
Learn - similar cultures can be very different
Hard - need to grow
Hard - lots of people were remote
Hard - Scrumbanish

6. Scrumbanish
Sprint board with features that moved through:
–Backlog -> Dev -> Test -> Release
No need to complete
1 week sprints
Really just catch-ups
Worked for 5 people, not 10

7. Test - May to September 2013
Sit together
Teach and learn
Easy - dev team support
Hard - testers sit with business
Learn - testers = SMEs

8. Team leads - May to July 2013
No teams!
Technical leaders
Still Scrumbanish
Fear of silos
Hard - large meetings
Hard - right people
Hard - what’s the role?

9. Teams - August 2013 to April 2014
Better Scrum needs smaller teams!
Hard - business buy in
Learn - great for priority management
Learn - sprint goals are expected, not rewarded
Learn - team leaders are multipliers
Learn - silos (aka teams) enable teaching

10. Lots of change - April 2014
Hard - fast growth, but we need more
Learn - no-one has the skills
Learn - smart, passionate
Learn - <3 teams

11. Growth - April to November 2014
A lot of growth
More to come
We’re used to it now
Developers at Powershop

12. Integration - April to June 2014
Goodbye dungeon
Learn - sit together, share culture
Hello today’s Powershop
Learn - sometimes you need to force change

13. Dev Managers - April 2014
Learn - we have amazing staff
Drive engagement
Teach and nurture
– Staff and community
Technical and line
Manage the SDLC - information vs decisions

14. Dev Train - April 2014
Starting point for all new developers
Teach Ruby
Enforce elegance
Set culture
1 to 4 months
Learn - attractor
Learn - clear signal of values
Efficient!

15. We needed another team
We did this
It worked OK
Learn - some people were scared
Learn - some people like change
Learn - customers don’t like it

16. Lean UX - June 2014
Pretty excited
More visible UX process
Added a UX researcher
Maybe more to come?
Learn - integration isn’t solved by an idea

17. Tell us your problems
Find the right solution
Stops waste
Drives engagement
Hard - business buy in
Learn - feels slower
Learn - some people just want a task

18. Now - November 2014
45 people in dev / test / design / PO + 6 interns
Total focus on teaching and learning
Growing quickly, but feels normal
Teams are engaged - they complain about it!
A culture of respect in an irreverent company
It’s fun and the kind of company we want to
work for

19. What’s left?
More integration
SDLC process
Need more:
–Developers
–Product Owners
–Interaction Designers
–UX Experts

20. Key take-aways
Reasons people want to work with us:
–Learning culture
–Training team
–High performance
–Elegance
–Diversity
Silos are good

21. Questions?

22. Brian Bannister @nz_brian
brian@powershop.co.nz
Andy Newport @newportandy
andy.newport@powershop.co.nz
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