This article was originally published at Medium on Jul 24, 2021
It was a sunny day as we prepared for a log-awaited release scheduled for that night. The team was excited, nervous, and going through a blast of feelings because it was far from a smooth sail to get here. Many sacrificed their weekends with their family and friends, postponed their vacation, and someone even postponed their wedding. The conference room showcased several empty styrofoam boxes and paper plates, but the team was determined and going through pre-steps to start the launch. But, it wasn’t like this when we started.
Last winter, this project shaped the delivery of a platform transformation to one of our brands ready to take the leap into the digital era of providing contextual content for their customers. Their product strategy was in place, but the scale and features required to deliver their vision were not in place. As we started to craft through architectural decisions, technology evaluations, and mapped dependency across our cross-functional teams, we had a plan to deliver THE PLAN. But, not everyone was onboard — one of the joys of working with shared services is usually priorities don’t have any boundaries. All of our cross-functional teams were getting pulled into that conundrum, and throughout the implementation, we had several realignments to keep the train on the tracks. But that wasn’t getting the train to the destination. The engineering team was needed and they weren’t even onboard this journey.
After much deliberation, escalation, and mind-numbing conversations on keeping it on the tracks, it hit me all of a sudden of what was missing: Culture. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic wand to invent Culture. You either have it or, nope, you can still foster it. After working closely with my peers and convincing them that this project had a culture problem, we devised a plan — Operation Everest. You see, if you need to scale Everest, it is quite an ordeal. Requires everyone to be prepared with various challenges but teamwork and mission to reach their goal is part of the Culture. And, our mission was no less than getting to Everest though it wasn’t physically straining but getting teams to mentally equip themselves to success.
We started a series of uplifting communications with the purpose of the initiative: our business partners came together and showcased their vision and possibilities with this initiative; we did micro-demos of functionalities being delivered to get our stakeholders and beta testers excited; our technology leadership cheered when we shared the weekly progress with them (with the entire team in cc). My boss and the rest of the SLT were transparent with us, but the team was spared. We flew cross-functional teams together, held technical sessions to resolve dependencies, and paired product leaders with the engineering team to shape our Culture. It was a culture of accountability, courage, and passion ready to get this initiative delivered — On time and with requested capabilities. Weekends became necessary as the teams got to the last part of the build and had several integration challenges and migration test runs to normalize the data sets. But, no one complained. Most of the engineering leaders also used to be in the office, alongside the team, not to monitor them but to assist with product questions, engineering challenges, and even helping with fine-tuning features in the product backlog.
It was a culture of accountability, courage, and passion ready to get this initiative delivered
The result surprised me beyond my expectations when a team member came up to me formally and voluntarily decided to postpone the wedding. I begged him to go ahead, but he stressed that he would rather have this release complete than enjoying his marriage while his peers would need him the most. I was speechless. The Culture starting to transform in this tribe.
- Every developer did frequent commits and generated PR days before the sprint was over to get code reviewed, and dark deployed to non-prods.
- Every Test Engineer collaborated actively with their observations and we help bug squish meet-ups twice a week to resolve and keep moving forward.
- Every Product Manager worked closely with Product Owners and actively refined features and mocks at least two sprints ahead of the technical leads to review and provide feedback.
- And, Every Engineering Leader was responsive to help for assistance if the team was stuck or a conversation had to be brokered.
This started to build the momentum, but every mission has a hurdle, and we hit ours when our business unit postponed our release. There was a logical reason to do so since MVP wasn’t meeting their immediate needs and they wanted to hit their competitor market harder than ever. The team viewed that as a setback and a failure on themselves not to deliver on time, but I viewed it as Culture taking the shape of accountability, passion, and courage to finish strong. That night, when I landed, I knew I had to address the team before we lost this momentum. I crafted a note articulating reasons for postponing the release and took the great words from Denis Waitley:
Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating.
The note was an impromptu one to keep scaling the heights and avoid looking this as a setback. I didn’t hear back from anyone that night, but I was overwhelmed when I barely noticed a strain of disappointment during the scrum next morning. The team was laser focused on delivering the remaining feature sets and squishing those bugs. Few of them even suggested doing additional dry runs to improve confidence for the go-live weekend. Heck, that was a brilliant idea.
Fast forward to deployment week, this crew successfully deployed the release within record time, and our business teams were more than prepared to start snatching the market share from our largest competitor. I credit my part to just like a team member participating in scaling Everest, but the Culture delivered it, and the team fostered it beautifully.