The process

On day one, I followed the Project Manager’s guidelines, for example, working 1–2 days for CityNews, then switching between mobile and web for Citytv for the rest of the week. Similarly, the developers were assigned sometimes half a day per project to then switch to another. The quarterly reorgs/layoffs, that plagues the media industry, also held leadership in a constant state of frenzy, which left a lot of oversight unchecked.

It took me a couple of months before I got a handle on things, and to fully realize all the opportunities. Since there was little oversight, it was easy to take over a few processes that I felt were mishandled. As long as I delicately appeased the Product Owners, they let me lead Spike and Extreme Meetings, and eventually dictate the release candidate schedules. I even took on some of the PM’s role of leading many stand-ups and retros, to which that individual was happy to be relieved of, and I was happy to do so.

I feel that sometimes we stick to processes—a specific meeting type for example—because another company or best-selling author has told us so. Doing something for the sake of its existence, is the bane of my existence. If we are going to conduct a retro, this is not a time where we hi-five each other for simply doing our jobs or a space where we complain that things are not set up exactly to our liking. It is also not the idea of a retro meeting that needs to be looked at, it's how it is being facilitated and that everyone understands why we need it. If there were problems, I was not shy about it. In addition, I made a concerted effort to lift the team into a place where we all felt comfortable enough to engage in healthy debate.

It took a few tries (I don’t easily get discouraged after one failed attempt), but I soon was able to gain respect from my developer teammates. One way I did this was to include them in the design process. A lot of them had great experiences working at Slack and Dropbox and provided great learnings that I benefited from, and I let them know that too. By including, they felt that they had a hand in the designs, and more importantly, they had a chance to share their thoughts and opinions.

Once discussions were underway, even when someone raised a concern or an idea and the team didn’t decide to go with, that individual still felt that their voice was heard. Encouraging healthy debate was key to reaching group consensus. It’s not about making sure everyone is happy, but ensuring everyone has had a chance to share their perspective.

Believe it or not, team members and stakeholders who feel they didn’t have a voice in deciding what to fix have sometimes been known to drag their feet.

Steve Krug, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself
Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems