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Retrospectives /wiki/spaces/AWELL/pages/3208347713
Continuous learning (/wiki/spaces/AWELL/pages/3490185310)
Product pitches Pitches /wiki/spaces/AWELL/pages/1627029524
Persona definitions /wiki/spaces/AH/pages/3500540204
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Fail fast (stay lean)
Innovation > predictability
Opinion-driven decisions are okay, but not without a plan for data
Keep a lean board by working “from right to left”
Communicate early and often
Succeed and fail as a team
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Value Streams
We believe in empowering our individuals by organizing them into small, usually cross-functional teams (we call them “pods”“value streams”) of 43-8 people and giving them ownership over a particular piece slice of our productthe business. Here are some guiding principles to our podsvalue streams (“VS”):
Pods VS should be both highly aligned AND highly autonomous
Pods VS should be open-sourced to the rest of the company
Pods VS should expect to be self-service
Pods VS are created with a mission in mind, and are individually responsible for defining their culture and their methods of execution
Highly aligned, highly autonomous
(plz forgive the ageist, sexist Dilbert-style boss)
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We expect high autonomy within our podvalue stream, but also high alignment with the long-term strategy of the organization and high alignment toward the pod’s VS mission.
Open-sourced
While pods VS might be responsible for a particular section of the product, other pods VS may depend on that piece of the product for a specific circumstance. In those cases, if the responsible pod VS is unable to help, then the dependent pod VS working on the feature is more than welcome to make changes to the code and submit to the owning pod VS for review.
Pods VS should never be “waiting” on another pod VS for work to be done. They are encourage to take the work into their own hands and rely on the owning pod VS for review. Velocity other fiefdoms.
Self-service
Pods VS should be completely self-service, meaning they should not rely on other pods VS in order to get work done. Related to “Open-sourced” above, pods VS are encouraged to do everything they need to do in order to meet their goals.
Mission, culture and execution
While a pod’s VS given mission is defined in the creation of the pod VS itself (and driven by the company and product strategy), the pod’s VS culture and the way the pod VS chooses to get things done are the responsibility of the pod VS members.
Each pod VS should have a page that contains the following information:
MISSION Mission (defined with the support of product leadership)
CULTURE Culture (what kinds of people reside in the podVS?)
EXECUTION Execution (how does the pod VS like to work?)
Incidentally, the culture and execution can together form an “API definition” for those outside the pod VS who are looking to collaborate with people inside of the podVS.
Credits
Much of these thoughts are not my own. They are graciously stolen from other companies that have failed their way toward a successful culture. So, we learn from their mistakes and thus will make our own unique set of mistakes (although hopefully starting from a higher elevation).
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