When growing a startup product development you encounter major challenges: How do you scale your product development teams? How do you keep as fast and responsive as you used to be? And how do you leverage the existing knowledge? In this talk I’ll show a couple of practices and rituals based around a Kanban board which captured our whole product development efforts with about 30 participants. I’ll show the design of the Kanban board, the policies and meetings around it and the personal duties ranging from a developer to a product manager up to the CEO. I will also compare it to other approaches from the community and what our lessons learned are. Slides from the talk at the Jax: https://jax.de/2015/sessions/how-do-product-development-when-you-no-longer-fit-one-room

1. Matthias Lübken
The product guy
@luebken
How to scale product
development when you
no longer fit in one room

2. About me
• Software Developer
• Agile Coach
• Director of software
development
• The product guy
• Herding cats

3. Microservice Infrastructure
based on Docker.
Visit http://giantswarm.io

4. What is your
context?

5. Our setting
• Company: A startup with product /
market fit.
• Process: Just do whatever works, and
if you get stuck, ask someone in the
room.

6. Our challenge
• Scale product development
• 1 4 teams.
• 7 30 colleagues.

7. Our (implicit) vision
“No process is a good process
“It’s about the people and their
interactions

8. Topics
• Cross functional teams
+ Devops
• Adaptive product roadmap
• Feedback in dev teams
• Continuous improvement
• Other ideas
Your questions!

9. (Cross) functional
teams

11. Devel-
opment
Product
Platform Adserver

12. Feature
Team
Devel-
opment
Product
Feature
Team
Feature
Team

13. Feature
Team
Devel-
opment
Product
Feature
Team
Feature
Team
Functional
Team

14. Feature
Team
Devel-
opment
Product
Feature
Team
Feature
Team
Functional
Team
Goal A Goal B Goal C

15. Feature
Team
Devel-
opment
Product
Feature
Team
Feature
Team
Functional
Team
Community of
practice

16. Lessons learned
• Slicing is hard
• Restructuring is painful
• Clear goal is crucial

17. DevOps

18. You build it. You run it.

19. Feature
Team
Devel-
opment
Product
Feature
Team
Feature
Team DevOps

20. DevOps team
• Created in the dev teams
• Lots to learn and understand
• Extracted into functional team
• Rotating 2nd level support in teams
rotating participation in the
DevOps team

21. Containers make you feel cozy

22. Lessons learned
• Special challenges require specialists

23. Adaptive product
roadmap

24. Our Kanban Board

25. Product Jour Fixe
CPO
Developer
POs
CEO/CTO
Architect
Other
Agile Coach

26. Sprint Reviews

27. Lessons learned
• High discipline needed
• Be prepared for hard questions

28. Feedback in dev
teams

30. Pairing vs PeerReview vs
PullRequests

31. Standup vs DoneThis-Emails

32. Lessons learned
• Be open to new ideas
• Coach teams

33. <meta>
</meta>
Continuous
improvement

34. If you do one thing in your process
do retrospectives.“

35. Small and big
retrospectives

36. Authority boards
see mangement30.com

37. Lessons learned
• Optimise locally and globally
• Take the time needed
• Be a good pace maker
• Make authority clear

38. Other ideas

39. No Blueprints
• Blue Prints like SAFe don’t work
• They are against all our instincts
“Dave Snowden
Put brutally SAFe seemed to be PRINCE II
camouflaged in Agile language. ... SAFe is not
only a betrayal of the promise offered by AGILE
but is a massive retrograde step giving the
managerial class an excuse to avoid any
significant change.

41. Agile Scaling Cycle
• Based principles and
working Agile teams
• "Autonomous business
facing teams taking
ownership of their process.”
@StefanRoock
• http://scaledprinciples.org

42. Jimdo
• Created culture manual
• Feel good manager
• Weekly Teamverløtung
• Goal #1
• Open Prio Meetings
> acknowledge mistakes
> have fun
> strive for the best
> ok to be crazy
> no deadlines
http://bit.ly/jimdostory

44. •Pick practices that fit
•Challenge yourself
•Do collaborative change
•Know your runway
Take aways

45. Matthias Lübken
The product guy
@luebkenQuestions?
Microservice Infrastructure
based on Docker.
Visit http://giantswarm.io

46. It’s hard
but fun!