How to make agile work as a developer? (Pt. 2)
Previously in Pt. 1, we have discussed why developers in Hong Kong or Taiwan think scrum is not working for them and one of the tactics on how to start the discussion with other stakeholders on the day to day activities of you and your team. Let’s discuss more about tactics we are using in GOGOVAN.
Put things into dollar signs
So whenever other stakeholders is pushing something into your schedule, and pushing for as soon as possible, and being aggressive. Bare in mind that we are in a business / capitalistic world. This behavior roots mostly in sales people and most successful business owners are best sales in their own trade. This is how they are successful. This is how they win. Stay calm, explain to them engineering requires some thinking in order to do it well and won’t create negative business impact down the road. In my career, I once saw a payment system got rushed through the door and guess what, there is a lot of miscalculation and performance issues after 2 years of production. And also make sure you celebrate publicly when they take your advice and things go smoothly.
Have some productive meetings
Being productive and meetings seems Oxymoron. And they are not. All meetings in GOGOVAN Engineering serve one purpose — alignment. If we think there is misalignment, be it the API design or the understanding of product request, to a specific implementation or any product direction, we ring the bell and call a meeting. In the meeting, there is always set contributor, set agenda, set duration and set process to think about the problem. We follows a very good piece from Seth Godin about what question should the meeting answers2. We also iterate on how we think about problems to make sure we are better each time we discuss problems. So after the meeting, I suppose everyone involved is clear what is our direction and what exactly needed to be done to solve that problem.
Time’s up again, let’s continue tomorrow.