What does that mean?

I work with amazing engineers, testers, designers, and product folk. Their knowledge is deep and their passion, evident. But, as a group, I felt we'd lost our way a bit over the years.

During those heady early days of Netwealth, we moved fast. We can all recall mornings when we would plan something on sheets of A3 on the floor and, by the evening, we'd have shipped it.

We're nearly 50 people now, so we can't just "move fast and break things" any more. But there had to be a way to speed up our processes and lean back towards greater innovation.

What did we learn?

There are too many topics to cover in this short post, but here are a few that really stood out for us.

Liz suggested some immediate changes that we could implement, including planning nearer to the work being done. Over the years, our quest for certainty has meant that we planned earlier and earlier. Now we're trying to embrace this uncertainty.

We dug deeper into optimising flow by working on smaller and smaller vertical slices, better integration of the QA role in our sprints, and management of Work In Progress.

An introduction to Cynefin as a means to identify complexity and then define more appropriate approaches to deal with problems.

Immediate Impacts

We've already seen the impact of changing our processes. One of our engineering teams decided to try to develop a new feature in a single sprint. They started with minimal knowledge; experimented and learnt together and, by the end of the sprint, they'd built it!

The Future...

As CTO I want to create a great engineering environment. A vital component of that is productivity. We want to build interesting things, ship them quickly, and see the impact they're having on our clients. We then want to learn from that and do it again, only better.

This month with Liz has flown by, but the impact has been remarkable. I can't wait to see what my teams do with this new-found knowledge and enthusiasm!

If this sounds attractive, and you'd like to join our team, check out our Open Engineering Positions.