Beyond XP

"Post-XP something" (will be replaced by the real name)

Attendees - Jesse, Jeffrey, Nat, Yuliya

Discussion

Discussed how Cloud Foundry practices changed since VMware acquisition and pandemic

1. Moved product managers and designers away (engineers could take over the backlog, but what about talking with customers?) 2. Changed what managers did (80% sw development -> full time manager) 3. Not using any co-location enabled practices (eg. breakfast, synchronization)

Alternative approach 1. Empower engineers to groom and own the backlog

Different teams have different problems: sometimes when the question is "who's gonna groom the backlog" people answer "not me", and sometimes there's 2 engineers and 5 people who are trying to tell them what to do, and solutions will be different

Pivotal PMs operating on tactical levels were operating more as business analysts, and couldn't focus on product vision and strategic work.

Post acquisition, the team was 16 people. Decision to stop looking at pivotal tracker, because pivotal tracker assumed pivotal process and we couldn't do that with the new team. Plus there was a lot of emotional reasons why it was hard to continue trying to do pivotal process despite the acquisition.

Switched to basecamp, 6 week iterations with "bets" (shaped solutions for chunky problems) + 2 week off for adjusting, evaluating, planning. The methodology is called "Shape up". The team decided to try this methodology for 6 months.