SpringOne Platform 2016
Speaker: Dan Podsedly; VP & GM, Pivotal Tracker.
Software companies large and small need to move fast, and that typically requires growing your product teams beyond the proverbial “two pizza” rule.
Finding and keeping great people is tougher than ever these days, but there is much more to scaling a product organization than just hiring! In this talk, Dan will walk through the challenges and opportunities encountered as product organizations grow from beyond the single agile team, based on real world experiences of Pivotal Tracker, a popular agile project management tool that’s been around for 10 years, as well as other fast growing product teams at Pivotal.
Topics discussed will include the importance of a strong culture, pair programming as a growth strategy, vertical vs horizontal team organization, the product manager role, how design fits into a product team at scale, and much more.
The Role of FIDO in a Cyber Secure Netherlands: FIDO Paris Seminar.pptx
Scaling Your Product Team While Staying Agile
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Scaling Your Product Team
While Staying Agile
SpringOne Platform, 2016
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Terms Matter: Project vs. Product
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Project
(noun) proj·ect ˈprä-ˌjekt, -jikt also ˈprō-
A planned piece of work that has a specific purpose (such as to find information or to
make something new) and that usually requires a lot of time.
Projects are finite. They end, and you move on to the next one.
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Product
(noun) prod·uct ˈprä-(ˌ)dəkt
A good, idea, method, information, object, or service created as a result of a process
and that serves a need or satisfies a want.
Products endure beyond projects that created them; they evolve indefinitely.
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A product-centric mindset focuses on the
customer and embraces sustainability
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill#/media/File:Molinos_de_Consuegra.jpg
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Let’s talk products!
(Yes, this is a real thing, yours for only $1,371.93.)
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Let’s talk products!
● Successful products spawn competition
● Non-linear increase of complexity
● New and evolving platforms
● Customers expect products to grow with them
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Growing product = more people, more complexity
How do we organize for sustainable growth?
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Origins: Pivotal Labs
● Born in the early Web 2.0 startup days
● Spawned agile team culture at Google, Twitter, eBay
● From 5 to 500 around the world
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Pivotal Tracker
● 10 years as widely used SaaS product
● From occasional pair to ~40 dedicated people
● The “transparent core” of every product team
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Cult of Sustainability
● Extreme Programming practices
● Sustainable pace; 8-hour work days
● Smooth transition at project end
● The real secret sauce: small, cross-
functional teams
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“Software development is an intense exercise in collaboration.”
—Martin Fowler
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Collaborative and Cross Functional
● Product, design, testers, and developers working together
● Shared, highly visible priorities
● Collective ownership, no project manager
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Roles: The Product Manager
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● Communicator, emphasizer, and motivator-in-chief
● Big picture vision, hands on fine-grained stories
● Learns, defines, and prioritizes
● Drives consensus but decides
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The UX Product Designer
● ”Full-spectrum" design
● Questions assumptions, obsessed with feedback
● Design vision vs. incremental steps
● Found pairing with PM, developers
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The Product Developer
● Pragmatic, full-stack, polyglot
● Can specialize but not hoard
● Pairs, plays well with others
● Motivated by the collective success
● Red, green, refactor, repeat
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Team Size: Optimizing for Communication
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Ten Group
“The basic unit is [a small group of people]. . .this group is bound together by a common
objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely
powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding
on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved. . .”
—Anthony Jay, British author, on the centuries of evidence to support the idea
that small groups are the most efficient
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● Software is more complex than farming (or is it?)
● Optimizing for communication
● How many pairs can one PM and backlog support?
● The “two-pizza rule”
Sizing the Product Team
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pizza-2.jpg
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How Many Pair-Brain Perspectives?
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How Many Pair-Brain Perspectives?
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How Many Pair-Brain Perspectives?
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Moving to Multiple Teams
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Paradigm-shifting game just broke the record for iTunes
downloads in the US.
People in the rest of the world and the Android crowd
are feeling left out, the servers go down every lunch
hour, a new platform and API is needed to support all
these apps, and the new CEO is roaming the halls
yelling, “Grow! Monetize!”
How to catch them all?
Case Study: Giantic Games, Inc.
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Tracker Support Says. . .
From: Pivotal Tracker Support
To: Giantic Games
Subject: Re: We’re struggling!
>> We’ve grown, and our project has gotten very hard to manage. We can’t tell who’s
working on what or when things will get done. Help!
Organize into multiple small teams, embrace a collective ownership mentality!
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Multiple Teams, Organized Around Platforms
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iOS Team
Evolve the app, deal with iOS
changes, in-app purchases
Web Front-End Team
Sponsored in-app content,
leaderboards, game tutorials
Android Team
Launch Version 1.0,
in-app purchases
Platform Team
Serve all the apps, scale up,
reduce the outages
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A Few Months Later. . .
From: Giantic Games
To: Pivotal Tracker Support
Subject: Got dependencies?
Hi again! We’ve split into small teams. But now it’s hard because every feature spans
multiple teams, all we do is have meetings, and things don’t work together!
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Symptoms of Poorly Aligned Teams
Products components not cohesive
People feel disconnected from the bigger picture
Back-end team not feeling recognized
Features span multiple PMs and require lots of coordination
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Tracker Support Says. . .
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Go Vertical!
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Conway’s Law
“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of
the communication structures of these organizations. . .Any piece of software reflects the
organizational structure that produced it.”
How to apply Conway’s Law for the best product outcome?
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Organizing Around Product Goals
● Teams focused on product outcomes
● PM + team drives entire feature end-to-end
● Minimized cross-team dependencies
● Product more cohesive to customers
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Giantic Teams, Reorganized FTW
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Core Game Play Team
Increase engagement, reduce churn
Scaling Team
Enough with the outages!
i18n Team
Launch in every continent
Monetization Team
In-app purchases—show us the money!
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A Real Example: Pivotal Tracker
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Tracker: Monolithic App, Rigid Horizontal Teams
● Back end, complex single-page web app + mobile apps
● Painful cross-team communication
● Rigid silos
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Platform Team (6 developers)
All Rails and API work, DevOps
Front-End Team (6 developers)
Web single-page app
Mobile Team (4)
iOS, Android
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Toward Product-Oriented “Pods”
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Story MGMT Pod
Increase engagement (web
and mobile), story-to-code
workflow
USS Enterprise Pod
New enterprise offering,
increase retention at
large companies
Infrastructure Pod
Scaling, stability, DevOps,
special projects (any part
of product)
Onboarding &
Growth Pod
Increase sign-up conversions,
engaged user activations
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Optimizing for Pod Rotations
● PMs stay with pods; pods change focus over time
● Developers rotate weekly based on pod needs
● Pairing = low ramp-up cost and knowledge sharing
● Need tools and process consistency!
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Code and Vertical Slicing
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● Mono repo for holistic view
○ Mono repo != monolithic architecture
○ More cohesive commits / PRs
○ Components deployed independently
● On-demand environments on PaaS
● Unified CI/CD and deploy pipeline
● Code quality a collective concern
https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/9585503388
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No Longer a One PM Show
● One uber PM, multiple pod-level PMs
● One visible, shared roadmap
● New product communication structure
○ daily product standups
○ weekly roadmap sync
○ product and design retrospectives
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Collaborative Design
● New role: Design Lead to own design vision and consistency
● The product roadmap as the collective design backlog
● Weekly design critiques and feedback sessions
● Designer rotation. . .it’s complicated!
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Bugs, Testing, and Support (featuring Mr. Pierre)
● Who fixes bugs?
● New role: Exploratory Tester
○ Charter-based testing
○ Rotates but worries about product as a whole
○ Proxy for the customer
● Who helps with support?
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The Next Level: From 5 to 50 Teams*
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*work in progress
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Paving the Way: Pivotal Cloud Foundry
● From OSS project at VMware to 300+
people at Pivotal
● 30+ teams, Pivotal Labs practices
● Major new version every three months
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Growth Challenges
● Many components, dependencies
● Some teams too large (15 pairs!)
● Cross-team communication issues
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Breaking Down a Large Team
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TCP Router
HTTP Router
CF API Server
Services API
Identity Server
Container Library
Release Mgmt
Droplet Executor
Health Manager
Runtime Team
TCP Router
HTTP Router
CF API Server
Services API
Container Library
Droplet Executor
Health Manager
Release Mgmt
Identity Server
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Conway’s Law, Revisited
● Collection of services is the product
● Scalable architecture with small teams and independent microservices
● Versioned, backward-compatible APIs
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● Priorities have to align
● Product has to integrate
● Releases have to be stable and coherent
The Biggest Challenge: PM Alignment
54https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#/media/File:Milkyway_Swan_Panorama.jpg
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30 Teams, 30 Product Managers
● One PM, one team, one backlog
● PMs monitor upstream and downstream dependencies
● Product Leads for cross-PM coordination
● PMs have to communicate!
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Product Org at Scale
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PM Lead
PM
VP Product
Engineers
Eng Director
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Next-Level Skill: Weekly Allocation with 300 Developers
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Testing and Integration
● Automation with selective test exploration
● System-level test suites that ensure product works cohesively
● Comprehensive CI pipelines with dependencies and artifacts
● Automated, on-demand acceptance environments on PaaS
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The Visible Forest
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Recap: Sustainable Growth in 4 Easy Steps
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Sustainable Growth in 4 Easy Steps
1. Build small, cross-functional teams
2. Organize these teams around product lines
3. Equip with process and tools that support shared ownership
4. Refactor and evolve!
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