MANAGING  AN  AGILE  TEAM  FARHAN THAWAR, VP ENGINEERING!

Sep 28th 2011!

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SHORT  BIO  

•  Coding  since  1986  •  Managing  coders  since  1998  •  Current  team  is  ~100  agile  engineers  

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AGENDA  

1.  Great  (not  good)  People  2.  Lightweight  Process  3.  Cadence  loop  

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ATTRACTING  GREAT  PEOPLE  

•  Other  smart  people  •  Interviews  

•  hard  problems  •  coding  •  propensity  to  acHon  

•  Speed  of  decisions  

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RETAINING  GREAT  PEOPLE  

•  Dan  Pink  •  Mastery  •  Autonomy  •  Purpose  

•  Great  people  are  10x  good  people  •  Be  the  "unblocker”  

•  Less  process  

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PROCESS  

•  Agile  the  Xtreme  Labs  way  •  Pivotal  Labs  •  Pair  programming  •  Fixed  hours  –  no  WFH  

•  Few  meeHngs  •  Decisions  over  deliberaHon  

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PROCESS  (TOOLS)  

•  Prefer  talking  over  email  •  Ranking  from  1..N  (not  high/med/low)  

•  Pivotal  Tracker  •  Agile  team  room  

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RESULTS  

•  Daily  •  Company  standup  •  Pla[orm  standup  •  Team  standup  

•  Weekly  •  Send  to  QA  •  Ship  to  customer  •  Demo  to  company  

•  Project  •  Kickoff  physically  with  customer  •  Submit  to  appStore  •  RetrospecHve