SendGrid’s history with Agile
I thought I’d highlight the milestones SendGrid has had in our Agile journey. Ground Zero When I started at SendGrid in May 2011, the organization was on the verge of adopting Agile and Rally’s agile software solution. In other words, the decision to move to Agile had been made prior to my start. (In fact, it was a key selling point used to get me to join SG.) The company was barely 18 months old, still a start up and had an Engineering staff of 10-15, tops. Hired as the first project manager and Agile coach, I was responsible for putting…
Now with more Meetups
Introducing the newest meetup: Agile Coffee – OC. I’ve been meaning to start this group since Stuart & I went up to San Fran for the SF Agile conference last May. There we met Jim Benson (Personal Kanban) and were introduced to Lean Coffee as a forum for discussing Lean, Kanban, Agile, limiting WIP, visualizing workflow, and just about anything else. A self-organized pull-system of learning / sharing. (Jim helped create Seattle Lean Coffee and has run it at dozens of conferences before the SF Agile event.) So that’s the goal here, in Orange County, is to get us together and start forming…
notes from retro: reducing distractions
By our Agile cadence at SendGrid, team retrospectives (and demos) fall every other Tuesday. Today one of my teams is coming up with a focused set of actions to try to solve the problem of distractions / context-switching. This team deals with many of our system-critical services (mail processing and delivery), so it’s staffed with really smart folks. (Well, really smart folks are on all our teams, but the features these folks work on receive a bit more attention than others.) They get interrupted often with everything from questions about our daemons and architecture to brain-teaser solutions and lego designs. Distractions are…
“I’ll have the salmon”
Simple words that answer the second-most important question at a business lunch. At any professional lunch, the most important question is directed at you and usually needs to come from you. (How often does your boss ever ask “so, what are we here to talk about?”) A great question may be “what are we here to fix?”, and you’ll have your answer, in bite sizes of course. This is, after all, a business lunch where all people talk – not a monologue. It’s also good to stay within custom when it comes to timing. Before your order is taken, stick to…
new year, new projects – a fresh start
With the new year comes a fresh new crop of initiatives targeted for the upcoming twelve months. And those initiatives ain’t gonna drive themselves to completion. This is where the project manager / scrummaster steps in resolutely and takes control. First, the tech leads of each team get together with the SMs and POs and hold a very important conversation: yearly scoping (aka commitments). The POs & product staff define the initiatives in broad strokes, then the tech leads discuss with each other what it takes to get these projects done. Slowly a list of Ins and a list of Outs begin to take…
Start Strong
“The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Hello coffee!
Agile coffee, indeed. I’ve had no fewer than three cups today. Resolutions for 2013: no more discussing coffee, today make most of Mike Cohn’s day with us talk through my retrospectives at SendGrid get out into the community talking about agile principles OHIO – only hit it once! That’s what’s brewing. Let’s make 2013 our best!