We specialize in Technical Program Management (TPM), Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), lean & agile transformations. We’re passionate about building agile, happy, and high performing teams to deliver online services at massive scale.

We have a team of TPMs to pull in for bigger engagements & programs via our robust, globally distributed, and vetted TPM Consulting Community.

Please contact jw@jwalpole.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwalpole for any enquiries

#agile #lean #leanthinking #softwaredevelopment #sdlc #tpm #technicalprogrammanager #pm #productdevelopment #productmanagement #happyteams

Principal Technical Program Manager & Founder at JWalpole Consulting was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

👨‍👨‍👧‍👦 It was so wonderful to see friends and family in person again. Zoom, FaceTime, or Google Meet don’t make up for cuddles and shared experiences together. I struggled with this, as did many others, during the international lockdowns. I had been to the UK during lockdown but under very difficult circumstances as my Mum was facing life threatening surgery. Thankfully, it was a success and she is doing very well indeed.

📚 👨‍🍳 It gave me time to read a bunch more books than normal, cook, learn more about the world & different cultures, focus on some more non-profit passion projects (teaching kids to code), and do some writing.

🏋️‍♂️ 🏊‍♂️ 🌊 🚲 It improved my physical health. I made a concerted effort to workout everyday, eat more healthily, and drink more water. I feel this improved both my mental and physical health.

It also helped me with work:

💡 I have reprioritized the top things I need to work on to have more impact on my return.

💡 I think that I had been suffering from some exhaustion due to some relentless projects (the ones that are multiyear marathons where self-doubt kicks-in at times), remote work, an incredibly challenging time to be in the the travel business (mandatory lockdowns), the very upsetting Ukraine War, and at times the press coverage felt unfair and inaccurate. This really got to me. We are continually trying to do right by our drivers, riders, employees, shareholders, and cities. I strongly believe human physical connections will continue to return and that our business is setup stronger than prior to the pandemic. You can read more about this on https://investor.lyft.com/overview/default.aspx

💡 Logan Green’s and John Zimmer’s mission to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation remains an inspiration.

💡 I’ve grown my trust in my colleagues even more. They didn’t drop the ball on anything and did a better job than I think I would have done myself! Empowerment + accountability is an incredible thing. I need to work on this more. I stayed connected to work for 30 minutes per day, mostly in a mentor role. I enjoy mentoring and it keeps my mind active. We have so many interesting problems to solve in the transportation and technology space.

Tip: before you take a recharge give plenty of notice to your team and write a coverage plan so that no one is surprised. Include emergency contact details just in case. This is respectful to your colleagues and ensures business continuity.

I’m very grateful to Amy Farrow and Peter Morelli for supporting my recharge and being solid rocks in my life for the past decade+.

I realize this recharge was a privilege and will be forever grateful for it.

Reflections on a recharge was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Register and watch NOW via this link: https://www.easyagile.com/events/?utm_source=li&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=roundtable-webinar#setting-agile-teams-up-for-success

Join agile experts, Nicholas Muldoon Co-CEO of Easy Agile, Dean MacNeil Head of Agile at Valiantys — Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, and John Walpole, Technical Program Manager at Lyft, in this roundtable as they discuss:

Setting Agile Teams up for Success. You will learn:

💡 The roles agile leaders play in driving the success of their teams

💡 How to create a compelling ‘why’ for agile that everyone will want to support

💡 Best practice for high-performing, agile teams

Register and watch NOW via this link: https://www.easyagile.com/events/?utm_source=li&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=roundtable-webinar#setting-agile-teams-up-for-success

Easy Agile & Lyft Podcast LIVE from Agile2022 in Nashville. Setting Agile Teams up for Success was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Connect, learn, be a part of something greater, and make a positive difference in the world.

Get in touch if you’re LGBTQIA+ or an underrepresented minority interested in starting a career in tech.

I can help with:
-Career advice
-Interview coaching
-Resume guidance
-Introductions to other professionals
-Nonprofit advice

You can connect with me via @jwalpole on Twitter, jw@jwalpole.com, or https://microsoftalumconnect.com

Microsoft Alumni Network Mentor Volunteer was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am fortunate enough to be on Lyft’s Team to deliver rider and driver delight as we seek to reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together. I’ve worked on many of Lyft’s critical projects, including splitting the app for drivers and passengers, our IPO, expanding to Canada, Bikes & Scooters, and many more.

Recently I was asked to think about some foundational principles that I have gathered after nearly 4 years at Lyft and 13 years working in TPM. With the help of some amazing mentors (Amy Farrow, Peter Morelli, Carlos Whitt, Amish Kagalwala, Sgreene, Nicholas Muldoon, and Nate VanDusen) as well as the Lyft TPM management team this post is where I’ve landed. This is the first in a series of posts on how Lyft TPM operates to deliver for our teams & customers. With the principles in place, I will then focus on optimizing flow and demonstrate how we applied both the principles and flow to one of Lyft’s biggest programs as a real-world example in a future post.

The principles below are the foundation for a high performing TPM organization and they are the same principles that enable us to deliver on Lyft’s mission to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.

1. Customer obsession

We know our customers well, we are engaged with them and get feedback from them frequently and consistently. We know their use cases, pain points, as well as their dreams, wishes, and desires. Our customers and partner teams believe we understand their needs and have their best interests in mind. Customers include riders, drivers, partners, cities, and employees. We thrive to delight our customers!

2. Ownership

We take full responsibility, accountability, and ownership of programs and portfolios to deliver customer delight throughout the entire project lifecycle — from ideation to ship, and maintain. We start with the business outcome, value proposition, and high-level view and then dive deep into the details, leaving no stone unturned. We do this by:

• Setting clear and measurable OKRs and driving continual accountability against those OKRs
• Agreeing and iterating on working agreements for our programs and portfolios to ensure we identify customers and stakeholders
• Implementing DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) framework
• Continually grooming a healthy product backlog
• Producing and iterating on product / technical / science specifications
• Limiting the work-in-progress (WIP) to optimize flow
• Aligning on standards ahead of time including a definition of ‘done’, test strategy, experiments & rollout plans
• Maintaining program health with a defined schedule and shipping cadence, gantt tracking (where appropriate) for super large programs and using execution tracking (JIRA and/or GSheets). We regularly check progress and team health against program health
• Documenting a clear communication plan with escalation paths for effective risk management
• Holding regular retrospectives to learn and iterate as we go

Our sense of ownership expands beyond initial execution. We take pride in having clear & crisp documentation to ensure visibility, accountability, alignment, and ease of scaling — something that has become even more important to support remote working across large distributed multidisciplinary teams. We utilize data, goals, and metrics to measure progress and adapt. Our communication is succinct, accurate, and backed with data; from one-pagers to status reports we have a clear call to action. When a program ends (ships/canceled/disbanded), ownership of the features and services shipped as part of the program is transferred to the run the business team, nothing is orphaned or dropped.

3. Technical depth

A healthy TPM organization has a deep understanding of our focus areas and spends time understanding the problem space, ensuring requirements and technical specifications are complete, and fully addressing the program objectives. It’s important to be curious, pressure test assumptions, experiment, and ship as soon as possible to validate those assumptions.

We respectfully challenge prioritization to ensure the most critical problems are addressed first. We take an all-encompassing view; we see the forest and understand the relationship between the trees. Through our deep understanding of the technical space, we help identify new opportunities and dependencies to ensure the right teams are included in programs and portfolios upfront to ensure they are part of the planning process from start to finish. We dig deep into datasets, build dashboards, and understand the details of the program specifications, code, tool, and processes thoroughly.

4. Teamwork, alignment, and cross-functional collaboration

We make relationships a priority. We deliver by empowering and inspiring our colleagues, rather than pushing to hit deadlines. We create working agreements to facilitate healthy discourse, listen, and use inclusive discussions to resolve conflicts and bring teams closer together. The end goal is always to deliver delight for our riders, drivers, partners, cities, and employees.

We lead by example on everything we do to inspire confidence, demonstrate competence, and run a tight ship. We do this by getting multiple teams aligned on one cross-functional shared goal as we strive to understand the diverse perspectives of our program and portfolio of teams. We are force multipliers: we bring people together to deliver way beyond their own capabilities. We celebrate success together and when problems come up, we ask, “how can I help?” We work with teams in conflict or struggling with a program goal to deliver clear recovery paths and align our teams, partners, and leadership on the recovery plan. We get our hands dirty and muck in to help.

5. Growth mindset

In everything we do, we create and grow psychological safety so we, the teams we work with, and partners can learn and grow. We are obsessed with retrospecting to drive continuous learning, improvement, and our own professional growth. We all have both mentors and mentees to make ourselves and others great and hold each other to a high bar. We don’t want to let our teams down. We stay humble and constantly ask for constructive feedback.

6. Simple & scaleable

Lyft TPM teams take complex problems and break them up and dilute them down into simple, elegant, and scalable solutions. Plans change, so we must be adaptable and agile to business needs. We achieve this through iterative delivery, learning, automation, and experimentation by shipping to get data and feedback allowing us to quickly adjust.

We start small with P0 prototype(s) and then MVP(s) to prove our hypotheses and then build on them week-after-week adding in P1s and P2s to reach full capability. We embrace lean principles and agile methodology to keep it simple and ship small increments quickly — when we fail we fail fast, learn, and change course.

7. Predictable

We manage to impact & outcomes. We keep the trains on the track and on time to spot risks ahead of time which allows us to respond and avert issues before they happen. When risks do materialize, we use a combination of diverse ideas from the team and data to present a clear call to action to get delivery back on track. We do this by:

• Building diverse and inclusive program teams
• Limiting the amount of work in progress (WIP) at once
• Breaking down work into small vertical chunks to support iterative shipping to prove our assumptions
• Carrying little technical debt
• Maintaining 100% test passing
• Always listening to our customers

We have tenacity and grit to work relentlessly to make programs and portfolios successful. We are meticulous planners, but we understand that the only constant is change and frequently update our plans based on learnings and changing business needs.

8. Portfolio approach

We take on complex, cross-functional initiatives, and company OKRs to deliver the most value against the highest business priorities. Large, complex, and highly cross-functional programs are where we add 10x the value. At Lyft we exercise good judgment in terms of when to work on outside projects which align with company values, whether giving team members an opportunity to volunteer with an organization they believe in or to work on exciting Open Source projects.

9. Fun!

We fully utilize our talents working on interesting and challenging problems in an effective system, working on a great team with teammates that we like, to make customers happy. This means we have much more fun at work! As a result, we are motivated, more dedicated, and much more productive.

Coming soon: a post about how I used these principles to optimize flow and deliver on a large cross-functional program at Lyft.

I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts: @JWalpole!

As always, Lyft is hiring! If you’re passionate about developing state of the art products and services or building the infrastructure that powers them, read more about them on our blog and join our team.

Technical Program Management (TPM) Principles @ Lyft was originally published in Lyft Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am fortunate enough to be on Lyft’s Team to deliver rider and driver delight as we seek to reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together. I’ve worked on many of Lyft’s critical projects, including splitting the app for drivers and passengers, our IPO, expanding to Canada, Bikes & Scooters, and many more.

Recently I was asked to think about some foundational principles that I have gathered after nearly 4 years at Lyft and 13 years working in TPM. With the help of some amazing mentors (Amy Farrow, Peter Morelli, Carlos Whitt, Amish Kagalwala, Sgreene, Nicholas Muldoon, and Nate VanDusen) as well as the Lyft TPM management team this post is where I’ve landed. This is the first in a series of posts on how Lyft TPM operates to deliver for our teams & customers. With the principles in place, I will then focus on optimizing flow and demonstrate how we applied both the principles and flow to one of Lyft’s biggest programs as a real-world example in a future post.

The principles below are the foundation for a high performing TPM organization and they are the same principles that enable us to deliver on Lyft’s mission to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.

1. Customer obsession

We know our customers well, we are engaged with them and get feedback from them frequently and consistently. We know their use cases, pain points, as well as their dreams, wishes, and desires. Our customers and partner teams believe we understand their needs and have their best interests in mind. Customers include riders, drivers, partners, cities, and employees. We thrive to delight our customers!

2. Ownership

We take full responsibility, accountability, and ownership of programs and portfolios to deliver customer delight throughout the entire project lifecycle — from ideation to ship, and maintain. We start with the business outcome, value proposition, and high-level view and then dive deep into the details, leaving no stone unturned. We do this by:

• Setting clear and measurable OKRs and driving continual accountability against those OKRs
• Agreeing and iterating on working agreements for our programs and portfolios to ensure we identify customers and stakeholders
• Implementing DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) framework
• Continually grooming a healthy product backlog
• Producing and iterating on product / technical / science specifications
• Limiting the work-in-progress (WIP) to optimize flow
• Aligning on standards ahead of time including a definition of ‘done’, test strategy, experiments & rollout plans
• Maintaining program health with a defined schedule and shipping cadence, gantt tracking (where appropriate) for super large programs and using execution tracking (JIRA and/or GSheets). We regularly check progress and team health against program health
• Documenting a clear communication plan with escalation paths for effective risk management
• Holding regular retrospectives to learn and iterate as we go

Our sense of ownership expands beyond initial execution. We take pride in having clear & crisp documentation to ensure visibility, accountability, alignment, and ease of scaling — something that has become even more important to support remote working across large distributed multidisciplinary teams. We utilize data, goals, and metrics to measure progress and adapt. Our communication is succinct, accurate, and backed with data; from one-pagers to status reports we have a clear call to action. When a program ends (ships/canceled/disbanded), ownership of the features and services shipped as part of the program is transferred to the run the business team, nothing is orphaned or dropped.

3. Technical depth

A healthy TPM organization has a deep understanding of our focus areas and spends time understanding the problem space, ensuring requirements and technical specifications are complete, and fully addressing the program objectives. It’s important to be curious, pressure test assumptions, experiment, and ship as soon as possible to validate those assumptions.

We respectfully challenge prioritization to ensure the most critical problems are addressed first. We take an all-encompassing view; we see the forest and understand the relationship between the trees. Through our deep understanding of the technical space, we help identify new opportunities and dependencies to ensure the right teams are included in programs and portfolios upfront to ensure they are part of the planning process from start to finish. We dig deep into datasets, build dashboards, and understand the details of the program specifications, code, tool, and processes thoroughly.

4. Teamwork, alignment, and cross-functional collaboration

We make relationships a priority. We deliver by empowering and inspiring our colleagues, rather than pushing to hit deadlines. We create working agreements to facilitate healthy discourse, listen, and use inclusive discussions to resolve conflicts and bring teams closer together. The end goal is always to deliver delight for our riders, drivers, partners, cities, and employees.

We lead by example on everything we do to inspire confidence, demonstrate competence, and run a tight ship. We do this by getting multiple teams aligned on one cross-functional shared goal as we strive to understand the diverse perspectives of our program and portfolio of teams. We are force multipliers: we bring people together to deliver way beyond their own capabilities. We celebrate success together and when problems come up, we ask, “how can I help?” We work with teams in conflict or struggling with a program goal to deliver clear recovery paths and align our teams, partners, and leadership on the recovery plan. We get our hands dirty and muck in to help.

5. Growth mindset

In everything we do, we create and grow psychological safety so we, the teams we work with, and partners can learn and grow. We are obsessed with retrospecting to drive continuous learning, improvement, and our own professional growth. We all have both mentors and mentees to make ourselves and others great and hold each other to a high bar. We don’t want to let our teams down. We stay humble and constantly ask for constructive feedback.

6. Simple & scaleable

Lyft TPM teams take complex problems and break them up and dilute them down into simple, elegant, and scalable solutions. Plans change, so we must be adaptable and agile to business needs. We achieve this through iterative delivery, learning, automation, and experimentation by shipping to get data and feedback allowing us to quickly adjust.

We start small with P0 prototype(s) and then MVP(s) to prove our hypotheses and then build on them week-after-week adding in P1s and P2s to reach full capability. We embrace lean principles and agile methodology to keep it simple and ship small increments quickly — when we fail we fail fast, learn, and change course.

7. Predictable

We manage to impact & outcomes. We keep the trains on the track and on time to spot risks ahead of time which allows us to respond and avert issues before they happen. When risks do materialize, we use a combination of diverse ideas from the team and data to present a clear call to action to get delivery back on track. We do this by:

• Building diverse and inclusive program teams
• Limiting the amount of work in progress (WIP) at once
• Breaking down work into small vertical chunks to support iterative shipping to prove our assumptions
• Carrying little technical debt
• Maintaining 100% test passing
• Always listening to our customers

We have tenacity and grit to work relentlessly to make programs and portfolios successful. We are meticulous planners, but we understand that the only constant is change and frequently update our plans based on learnings and changing business needs.

8. Portfolio approach

We take on complex, cross-functional initiatives, and company OKRs to deliver the most value against the highest business priorities. Large, complex, and highly cross-functional programs are where we add 10x the value. At Lyft we exercise good judgment in terms of when to work on outside projects which align with company values, whether giving team members an opportunity to volunteer with an organization they believe in or to work on exciting Open Source projects.

9. Fun!

We fully utilize our talents working on interesting and challenging problems in an effective system, working on a great team with teammates that we like, to make customers happy. This means we have much more fun at work! As a result, we are motivated, more dedicated, and much more productive.

Coming soon: a post about how I used these principles to optimize flow and deliver on a large cross-functional program at Lyft.

I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts: @JWalpole!

As always, Lyft is hiring! If you’re passionate about developing state of the art products and services or building the infrastructure that powers them, read more about them on our blog and join our team.

Technical Program Management (TPM) Principles @ Lyft was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Credits; thank you to the amazing mentors at Microsoft (James Stanbridge), Google (Kristen Johnson), Twitter (Steve Greene, Nate Van Dusen, Sara Haider), Easy Agile (Nicholas Muldoon). and Lyft (amy farrow, Amy Kim, Eran Davidov, Carlos Whitt, Peter Morelli and many more) who have helped me to tune this approach over many years. Also thanks to my fellow panelists Nariman Riahi from eBay, April Enoe, PMP, CSM from Uber, Matthew Yuan from Twitch, our awesome moderator Dolly Pratyusha Dogiparthy, and amazing organizers Billy Pham and Jaclyn Akers.

Strong stable teams increase focus on the right things for their customers, improve productivity & predictability, and create much happier team members. In addition, we should see:

1. Significant increase in organizational stability. Re-orgs become much less frequent and team members are generally insulated from the impact when they occur.
2. The leadership team will have much stronger levers for impact and can move away from tactical focus on trivial problems to a more strategic stance focused on strategy, prioritization, funding/investments, removal of systemic obstacles, and org alignment.
3. Less management required, less territorialism, more cross-functional collaboration.
4. More focus on optimizing our customers desires and the company’s success.
5. Much more transparency and trust across the organization.

Foundation/prerequisites for an atomic High-performing Team

Purpose

Name: The team has a short, descriptive name that can be related to the primary technology. No non-descriptive code names (unless absolutely necessary)

Charter: The team has a <= 3 sentence charter describing its purpose. The Team Charter should have minimal overlap with other teams to avoid redundancy and conflict but should have a relationship to other charters.

Customers: The team has a definition of who its customers are, what their needs are, and

establishes an ongoing relationship to gather requirements and feedback.

Ownership: Teams declare what they own and maintain (features, services, technology, code). If a team is disbanded, ownership of their features and services should be transferred to another team (nothing is orphaned).

Content

Roadmap: The team has a multi-quarter roadmap and a set of quarterly OKRs (outcomes) that gives team members context to build for long term goals.

Backlog: The team has a single, stack-ranked prioritized backlog of work (pull system) that includes features, technical debt, architectural work, optimization, automation, tools, bug fixes, etc. The team builds in the order of the backlog to assure the highest priority work for customers gets done first.

Funding: The team has all the resources (headcount, capex/opex) it needs to operate autonomously and is funded sufficiently to achieve their charter to the satisfaction of their customers (speed through the backlog).

People

Dedicated Members: The team is a group of people who are not on other teams (EMs, designers, researchers may be on 2 teams, etc) with shared accountability for team outcomes. Dedication reduces context switching and improves productivity for team members. Our team members are diverse and inclusive — we build products for everyone in the world. We comply with and go beyond NISTIR8366.

Skills: Team membership is composed of the right mix of level (senior, mid-level, and entry level), technical skills (eg. software team = front end, back end, ios, android, etc.) to deliver on the charter.

Size: Generally we want the smallest possible team that can deliver their charter. We prefer 5–10 people on a team. Teams >10 lose relevance, shared accountability, increase coordination overhead, and lose productivity quickly. At the same time, teams should not be so small that they reduce effectiveness and connection to the greater goals. As programs scale (sometimes needing hundreds of people to deliver) they scale up in units of ~10 pulled together via a scrum of scrums model — modeled on Roman contubernium & centuria. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contubernium

Persistence & Stability: Teams with consistent team membership will outperform high-churn teams. We strengthen and stabilize teams by allowing team members to be persistent over a long period of time. We give teams the time to build strong bonds, optimize their workflow, deepen their understanding of their customers & their technology to achieve high performance.

Co-location: The team ideally has a physical location where team members sit, shortening communication channels to drive effectiveness and productivity. We may have distributed team members on some teams but we strive for this state where possible.

Characteristics of a High-performing Team

Characteristics of a High-performing Team are below. Teams that strive for excellence in these areas generally outperform their peer teams and companies.

Team Dynamics

Shared Accountability: High-performing teams win together and lose together. They collectively own their charter, the customer, and all of the work necessary to deliver on the strategy. Team members optimize their work to deliver collectively on the short-term and long-term team goals. No one works alone, no one is an island. There is no such thing as “I did my part” when the team has failed and the customer loses. Team members hold each other accountable while supporting their success.

Self Organization: Empowered, self-organized teams are motivated and realize the full potential of team members. Self-organization drives a stronger sense of ownership, learning, personal growth, productivity, and performance. Self-organizing teams decide how to implement, how much work to take on, and how to improve themselves.

Teamwork: High-performing teams optimize team throughput over individual efficiency. Teams that work well together are multipliers of their own productivity. High performing teams have a high level of trust between team members that drive effective collaboration and greater confidence in delivery. Team members work together on features and technology for their customers and help each other in need. Senior team members mentor other team members to fuel growth and make everyone feel like a member of the team.

Effective Conflict Resolution: High-performing teams know they will have conflicts in strategy, implementation, priorities, and how things get done. They are flexible and compromise when needed, always with the needs of the customer in mind. They have effective conflict resolution methods, have confidence in the system & their leaders, and don’t shy away from resolving as soon as possible. Decision making responsibility is clear and decisions are made within the context of the larger strategy and priorities. If a resolution cannot be reached locally the escalation path is clear to everyone involved and resolution at higher levels is swift.

Transparency: Full transparency builds trust. Providing full transparency to everything the team does allow customers and stakeholders to engage and partner in the process of building solutions to satisfy their needs. Transparency allows the team to be self-organizing and self-correcting while enabling help from outside the team to remove obstacles.

Adaptable and agile: High performing teams adapt quickly to new information. They possess the agility to pivot quickly when necessary to respond to new customer needs or changes in priority or strategy. They do this by limiting WIP, breaking down work into small vertical chunks, carrying little technical debt, maintaining 100% test passing, and listening to their customers. The only constant is change — which relies on our ability to adapt fast.

Content & Workflow

Healthy Backlog: The backlog is the central pull-system for the team with the quality of the backlog critical to optimal flow and team success. The team backlog should be stack-ranked, consistently groomed, made up of small, discrete items, that can be completed in one iteration, and include customer facing features, tech debt, broken windows, legacy automation, & architectural work. The backlog enables a portfolio approach to optimize the long term strategy while focusing the team on short term execution.

Limited work-in-progress (WIP): It seems counterintuitive but when we limit our work-in-progress we see our bottlenecks, we increase our throughput, we learn faster, and we deliver more effectively for our customers. When we exceed the amount of work we can handle, it heightens our distraction and decreases our concentration. Our attention to detail suffers, we leave things unfinished, or compromise the quality of our finished product. All of these outcomes create more work for us in the future.

Test Automation DNA: Testing is in the DNA of every high-performing team. The team has automated tests that provide sufficient test coverage for all parts of the product, technology, or hardware, the team has full visibility into the success of tests, and tests are passing everyday at 99%+. Software test suites cover unit, functional and integration tests. Any legacy test gaps have a roadmap and are on the team backlog. The team uses Lyft (or industry) standard test frameworks and tools.

Definition of Done: High performing teams build quality into everything that they do. They know that pushing product and technology into production that isn’t ready doesn’t delight customers and lowers team productivity. Having a shared team Definition of Done for incremental development & deployment ensures high-quality delivery every time for our customers, eliminates the “illusion of progress”, increases throughput & predictability, and makes the team more productive.

Continuous Improvement: Teams that continuously improve are able to continuously increase value delivered to customers. High-performing teams consistently look back at how they’ve performed with the goal of learning and improving their ability to deliver. They pursue candor and deep insights with each other to identify and address bottlenecks, obstacles, waste, tool deficiencies, and communication challenges. They regularly select one or two ideas to experiment with.

Outcomes

Delighted Customers: High-performing teams are customer focused and have delighted customers. They know their customers well, they engage with them and get feedback from them frequently and consistently. They know their pain points, as well as their dreams, wishes, and desires. The customers of high-performing teams believe the team understands their needs and has their best interests in mind.

Employees have Fun: When team members fully utilize their talents working on interesting and challenging problems in an effective system, work on a great team with teammates that they like, and make customers happy they have much more fun at work. Employees that find work to be fun are much more motivated, much more dedicated, and much more productive.

— — — — — — — —

Next up I am going to put together a piece on kicking off programs from day 1 as best you can to prepare for it scaling to hundreds of team members working on a single program. Please reach out to me if you are interested on Twitter John Walpole — I’m always looking to learn from others and hear about your experiences in TPM execution and delivery excellence. Thank you!

Building High Performing Teams at Scale was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Bike Team will prioritize Team Dynamics around the following High-performing Team characteristics:

Accountability: High-performing teams win together and lose together. They collectively own their charter, the customer, and all of the work necessary to deliver on the strategy. Team members optimize their work to deliver collectively on the short-term and long-term team goals. No one works alone, no one is an island. There is no such thing as “I did my part” when the team has failed and the customer loses. Team members hold each other accountable while supporting their success.

Self Organization: Empowered, self-organized teams are motivated and realize the full potential of team members. Self-organization drives a stronger sense of ownership, learning, personal growth, productivity, and performance. Self-organizing teams decide how to implement, how much work to take on, and how to improve themselves.

Teamwork: High-performing teams optimize team throughput over individual efficiency. Teams that work well together are multipliers of their own productivity. High performing teams have a high level of trust between team members that drive effective collaboration and greater confidence in delivery. Team members work together on features and technology for their customers and help each other in need. Senior team members mentor other team members to fuel growth and make everyone feel like a member of the team.

Effective Conflict Resolution: High-performing teams know they will have conflicts in strategy, implementation, priorities, and how things get done. They are flexible and compromise when needed, always with the needs of the customer in mind. They have effective conflict resolution methods, have confidence in the system & their leaders, and don’t shy away from resolving as soon as possible. Decision making responsibility is clear and decisions are made within the context of the larger strategy and priorities. If resolution cannot be reached locally the escalation path is clear to everyone involved and resolution at higher levels is swift.

Transparency: Full transparency builds trust. Providing full transparency to everything the team does allow customers and stakeholders to engage and partner in the process of building solutions to satisfy their needs. Transparency allows the team to be self-organizing and self-correcting while enabling help from outside the team to remove obstacles.

Adaptable and agile: High performing teams adapt quickly to new information. They possess the agility to pivot quickly when necessary to respond to new customer needs or changes in priority or strategy. They do this by limiting WIP, breaking down work into small vertical chunks, carrying little technical debt, maintaining 100% test passing, and listening to their customers. The only constant is change — which relies on our ability to adapt fast.

Credits; thank you to the amazing mentors at Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Lyft who have helped me to tune this approach over many years.

Characteristics of a High-performing Team was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I joined Lyft Engineering on the Technical Program Management Team a few weeks ago. Here are my top three thoughts on the first two weeks:

Customer obsession. We are laser focused on doing the right thing for our customers. We’re obsessed with building a better service for passengers and drivers. So much so that I could not personally fully understand the driver experience and pain points that we need to solve for our drivers. I saw the many metrics we track and detailed feedback but how could I ship things to improve what drivers experience if I hadn’t even driven for Lyft? I needed to be able to empathize with drivers. At the weekend I bought a car and on Monday completed my first few rides. It felt great to see the service/app come to life on the road from the other side of the passenger/driver relationship. I had amazing passengers who were full of interesting stories and suggestions for improvements. As I build up my miles on the road I also want to stop by some of the driver meet ups that our incredible driver community run to listen & learn more.

Talented & happy people. There is a real energy, excitement and a good vibe in the office. People are busy doing meaningful work that they are passionate about. Positive intent is assumed and you are empowered. Teams work and socialize together in a genuine & refreshing way while respecting work life balance.

Interesting problems. From mapping, accurate estimated times of arrival to autonomous cars we have some tough and interesting engineering problems to solve. At times these can be daunting but I know we can do it with our focus on customer obsession and talented people.

Before I joined I knew I loved the Lyft service as a passenger — so much so that we took a Lyft as our official wedding carriage and have since become friends with driver who was so awesome on our wedding day. It feels amazing to be a part of the engineering team powering so many special rides everyday.

Lyft Engineering - focus on customers, people and problems. was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Twitter we often do roadmapping in Confluence, Whiteboards and/or Google docs. This works well until we need to move them into JIRA for the user story breakdown and then over time the original doc becomes stale. We looked at JIRA Portfolio to address this but the tool is a little too heavyweight for our needs. We have found the sweet spot with an add-on called “Easy Agile Roadmaps for JIRA” in the Atlassian Marketplace. The plug in allows us to space out our key epics, by theme, based on expected ship dates and quickly communicate keys dates to all dependent teams; sales, marketing, finance, ops etc.

More details

Roadmaps are an essential tool for every product manager. They enable a product manager to communicate the vision and journey a product will take over time, ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page.

Easy Agile Roadmaps for JIRA enables the product manager to quickly:

• build a sequential roadmap of epics,
• split epics into swimlanes (called themes),
• add markers to the roadmap to show events,
• size epics to show how long a chunk of work is estimated to take,
• track progress towards epic completion, and
• keep stakeholders appraised of updates.

Easy Agile Roadmaps enables teams to align around the vision for a product and how they’ll sequence features for delivery to customers.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.arijea.easy-agile-roadmaps/cloud/overview

Easy Agile Roadmaps for JIRA @TwitterTPM was originally published in JWalpole Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.