Beyond XP

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

Attendees - Jesse, Jeffrey, Nat, Yuliya, Andreas

Discussion

This was a discussion about how Cloud Foundry practices changed since VMware acquisition and pandemic What happened?

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)
4. Emotional anguish of losing something special

And maybe pivotal wasn't perfectly solving some things in the first place. Eg. Pivotal PMs operating on tactical levels were operating more as business analysts, and couldn't focus on product vision and strategic work.

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Post acquisition,

1. the team was 16 people.
2. Decision to stop looking at pivotal tracker, because pivotal tracker assumed pivotal process and we couldn't do that with the new team. The team switched to basecamp
3. The team decided to try "Shape up" methodology for 6 months. 6 week iterations with "bets" (shaped solutions for chunky problems) + 2 week off for adjusting, evaluating, planning. It was very successful for prioritizing and getting done work of the "Shapeup" size
4. It became much easier to advocate for your career advancement cause collective effort and accomplishment transitioned to personal accomplishment. Which freed up a lot of management time, however it also meant that a lot of "non-glamorous work" wasn't getting done
5. The team ended up going back to Pivotal Tracker sometime later in order to solve new problems, and after a break it was actually easier to use it again and for a new problem the team was trying to solve