I wrote a blog post on this here: http://blog.semanticfoundry.com/2012/06/27/how-do-we-collaborate-presented-at-agileux-meetup-in-nyc/ On Monday, June 25th, Ben Grohe, Ben Burton and myself representing Product Management, Engineering, and Design, respectively, spoke at a local meetup of the Agile Experience Design group here in New York City, hosted by Pivotal Labs. It was a great event, with about 100 people coming out representing the NYC tech scene. We were invited to speak about how our teams collaborate and what processes and tactics we use to to concieve, design, build, release, and measure products for our customers. To discuss this really requires us to step back and address the organization structure and processes here at TheLadders that makes us unique. Over the last decade, TheLadders has been able to not only survive, but thrive, in the hyper-competitive online job matching space, because we have discovered that shared and collaborative teams, rather than heroic and authoritarian management, is what unlocks the potential of a creative, agile organizations capable of rapidly adapting to market conditions and pivot quickly to exploit new opportunities. At TheLadders, our adaptive, agile structure embraces distributed leadership – the entire organization has a shared understanding of the corporate vision and strategy as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, and decision-making is placed with autonomous teams responsible to delivering on those KPIs. Over the last decade, TheLadders has been able to not only survive, but thrive, in the hyper-competitive online job matching space, because we have discovered that shared and collaborative teams, rather than heroic and authoritarian management, is what unlocks the potential of a creative, agile organizations capable of rapidly adapting to market conditions and pivot quickly to exploit new opportunities. At TheLadders, our adaptive, agile structure embraces distributed leadership – the entire organization has a shared understanding of the corporate vision and strategy as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, and decision-making is placed with autonomous teams responsible to delivering on those KPIs. Because the product, user experience, and development teams embrace Agile, we are able to meet changes in organization needs and pivot, usually in a matter of days (not months or quarters), to meet new challenges through innovation in delivering customer value.

1. How do we
collaborate?
Presented at Agile Experience Design Meetup June 25th
Ben Burton
Will Evans
Ben Grohe

2. Organization sets strategic KPIs
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3. Scrums are organized around a specific
domain / customer segment
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4. Scrum team organization
• Product Owner
• Dev. Manager
• Scrum Master
• Product Manager
• UX Lead
• 3 or 4 Engineers
• Copywriter
• Visual Designer
• Quality Assurance
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5. High-level problem statements are
articulated
(A huge fucking flood is
coming -> We face
extinction)
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6. Quantitative & qualitative research is
conducted to understand the nature of
the problem space(s)
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7. Focus group is pulled together with real
customers to gauge needs/pains/desires/
goals
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8. Problem statements are broken down into
smaller, more edible problem statements
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9. Product owner does not present scrum
with solutions (you will build an Ark!)
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10. Team brainstorming and/or design studio
Shitload of ideas are generated
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11. Problem statements are turned into
hypotheses
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12. Ideas are turned into stories based on
sketches or wireframes (based on size of
potential solution)
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13. Not all deliverables are bad.
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14. Sometimes, no deliverables at all are
needed
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15. Metrics are agreed upon to define choice
set of pivot or persevere
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16. Use Trello to pull stories through the flow
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17. sketches/designs/mocks/prototypes with
real users in usability testing
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18. Share everything with the team
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19. Release the damn thing (in small, testable
chunks)
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20. We have deep BI expertise, but
sometimes, we need numbers faster….
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21. Use Mixpanel to move quantitative
analysis down to the scrum team
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22. Report learnings back to product owner
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23. If fail, pivot. If succeed, celebrate & iterate
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