Hannah Kane: 2015 Year in Review, Part 2

Среда, 23 Декабря 2015 г. 04:51 + в цитатник

2015 was a great year for the MLN Platform team. I recently shared a timeline of the work that was accomplished this year, but now I’d like to focus a bit on how the year went from a process perspective.

The team formed early in the year and quickly launched the first version of Teach.mozilla.org. We used agile methodologies to quickly iterate based on user feedback and testing. The team went through some changes mid-way through the year, but at any given point during the year, it felt like a strong, cross-functional team showcasing great teamwork, communication, and enthusiasm for the projects.

We made use of the heartbeat model all year long. We started each heartbeat with a planning meeting, did a daily stand-up, and ended every heartbeat by joining the full product team for a demo. We also used Github all year long, and it became an active place where we benefited from frequent feedback from members of our community, as well as a useful way to collaborate with other team members from across the organization.

Meanwhile, the CDOT team, led by Dave Humphrey, kicked into high gear in the Spring to finish the Brackets integration project. Luke joined soon after and was able to take the Thimble UI and UX to the next level. We launched the new Thimble on August 31, and received great reviews from users. This team worked together closely, with regular stand-up meetings, and semi-regular backlog grooming sessions (aka triage).

In the last quarter of the year, we continued to build and maintain the Teach site and add new features to Thimble, but we also started to look toward 2016 plans. We did a lot of ideation and research work on upcoming projects including an MLN Directory, a Curriculum Database, and the next iteration of Badges. We also found the time to revamp X-Ray Goggles, as part of the year-long process to retire some tools and upgrade others.

Though overall I think 2015 was fantastic, while reflecting on the year, I’ve come up with a list of things I think we can improve in 2016:

More retrospectives. I think we only did two or three all year! I’d like to think this is largely because things felt good most of the time, but I also know that there’s always room for improvement, and having a regularly scheduled retrospective can surface small process tweaks that make a world of difference. (I’m showing my Scrum Master roots here. :))
Work on shared ownership. Though the team is cross-functional, we managed to silo ourselves within the team. The main symptom of this problem is when stand-ups become each person updating the PM, rather than team members coordinating with one another. I’d say our stand-ups, on average, were about 75% updates, and only 25% coordinating. Definitely room for improvement.
Clarify the shape of the work and the team. It’s never been completely clear what the mandate for this team includes—certainly teach.mozilla.org, and things that are driven by the MLN team—badges, the web lit curriculum, Clubs, the Gigabit and Hive sites. But what about the MozFest website and app, which members of our team contributed to? What about Thimble? Goggles? In theory, it’s not a big need to define borders between things. But in practice, it can be confusing. When do we need to schedule a new stand-up? When do we need a separate repo? How do we prioritize when we’re comparing figurative apples and oranges? How can we easily visualize and account for people’s capacity when they’re working on multiple projects?
Better articulate our goals and how we will measure them. The first version of the Teach site was intentionally brochure-ware, without many specific conversion targets or KPIs. After two-thirds of a year, I think we can now clarify specific goals and set up the instrumentation to measure them. The research Laura and Bobby did in Q4 has really helped with this (stay tuned for the third post in this series).

And some of the biggest process wins from 2015 (IMO!):

Working on multiple projects allowed us to make certain things more efficient and unified. A great example of this is how the X-Ray Goggles team borrowed from the Thimble landing page during the redesign.
We were responsive to evolving programs. For example, the Clubs program, in its inaugural year, went through several shifts that required changes to the site content and to user workflows. While we weren’t always able to keep pace with the needs, I do think we were able to accommodate many of the changes.
Having a consistent team for months at a time was luxurious and I believe beneficial to the end product.
Having high standards. I’ll speak specifically to design, though this extends to engineering work as well. I credit Cassie and the design team for leveling up our design work this year. The design team crits, crowd-sourcing of Redpen feedback, audits, and intense attention to detail led to some of the most consistent, strong design work I’ve seen.
Is having awesome team members a process win? Because, man, I like the people on this team. Mavis, Sabrina, Atul, Jess, Dave, Gideon, Kieran, Jordan, Luke, Kristina, and Pomax—thanks for being so smart, talented, easy going, enthusiastic, and delightful to work with!