Agile, Scrum & Kanban

Scaling Engineering @ Trustly

Trustly has seen significant growth in Europe and North America over the past year, with North America now representing close to half of total group revenue. In response, the Engineering team has doubled in size, expanding to 109 full-time employees across Brazil, Portugal, and the US. The team has evolved their road mapping and planning processes, and formalized the idea of a Technology Tribe to dedicate Engineering resources for Scalability, Reliability, Security, and Resiliency. The team looks forward to continued growth and evolution in 2022.

Establishing the Goals for an Acquired Organization

A year ago, the author joined the office of a startup bought by their current company with the intent to expand their product across the US and globally. Through conversations with stakeholders and user research, the author proposed a flywheel structure and identified critical narratives and key metrics to measure performance. They also identified four future value streams and personas, and set goals for each vertical with key metrics. The team grew from two to ten members, and the business increased 8x in the next year according to the current plan. The author learned to build trust, think about users when building the team, not rush to hire people, and go deep to add value.

How to Get Your Team Back on Track

When joining a company with a team that was not executing well and slipping deadlines, the author had to build trust and credibility while firefighting. Through 1:1s with the engineering team, they identified patterns of the issues and worked with different stakeholders to address them. The author also worked closely with the quality organization and pushed back against the product management. After 30-60 days, the author had earned the trust of the team and created long-lasting relationships. Lessons learned include focusing on people first, never being afraid to do the right thing, and being open to different perspectives.

Finding Peace Between Culturally-Diverse Teams

When taking over a large team with a lot of churn and political issues between the US and India, the main goal was to bring civility and trust. To do this, the team was broken into three groups, an employee from India was promoted to provide mentorship, and a people manager was brought in. Training material was created, and a two-week onboarding session was set up for new members. In order to build trust, the manager met with each team member every quarter. Compromise was essential, and the responsibilities were shared fairly. Ultimately, this sense of unity was able to mend the rift between the two teams.

The Early Days of Agility

After forty years in software development, the author found himself in a chaotic environment with a development team of thirty people. The team was utilizing the waterfall style of working, which was becoming outdated, and their deliveries were one to two years behind. The author then introduced the Agile Manifesto and Extreme Programming to the team, which included changes to the process, programming languages, office policies, and payment structure. The release that followed was late, but of a higher quality than before, and subsequent releases hit their mark. The author learned that producing quality does not require large sums of money, that agile processes are necessary to keep up with changing markets, and that integrated teams and testing will increase the potency of troubleshooting efforts.

Shortening the Feedback Loop to Improve Collaboration

This article discusses the difficulties of a long feedback loop in a company where the certification process was done externally to the team. To overcome this, the team proposed an idea where they had certification dates, which allowed them to focus on the certification with the external team during the last two or three days of the iteration. This shortened the feedback loop and increased collaboration between teams, allowing them to prioritize the most important items in the backlog.