HACKER Q&A
📣 bredren

Can you share insights on developing or participating in project teams?


Is anyone working in project teams using "plan, build, ship" or no formal methodology project management environments?

I'm looking to learn from people who have had success repeatedly building cross-organizational project teams focused on specific outcomes.

For example, a team is tasked with "Grow revenue of product X by Y %" or "Rework our dev env setup to reduce the time to productivity for joiners."

This is in contrast to back-to-back scrum-based sprints where an ongoing set of new tasks are pulled from a backlog and picked up by anyone with bandwidth and knowledge of the issue's subject area.

These teams might be given little other guidance or required process, and the very ideas for these projects may come from ICs in engineering or bizops going about their normal tasks.

I'm curious about the full lifecycle, including the role of leadership support, evaluation of success, the breakup and re-formulation of these teams and what if any project management structures have worked well.

So far, I have not been able to put my hands on much description of this style of program management, though it is teased at in this recent Pragmatic Engineer article. [1]

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/

  👤 sumanthvepa Accepted Answer ✓
One of the teams I manage does use a 'plan build ship' system. The cycles are relatively short though. The whole plan, build, ship cycle is about 4 weeks. But it's a little more complex than that. I do the planning for the next cycle while the team is working on build and ship for the current cycle (or sprint if you prefer.). One book I came across, that I found interesting, was 'Shape Up' from Basecamp[1]. The ideas around shaping the work that needs to be done are interesting. The book, essentially, somewhat formalises what most teams are probably doing during the planning phase. You need a period of fuzzy exploration during the early stages of a project. For example the team I'm managing is trying to find product/market fit, so the there is no well defined series of tasks initially. The goal of planning is to define these tasks. Most of the time time that means building several exploratory prototypes and showing them to users and iterating on that. Or exploring concepts etc. This is the work I do in parallel with production development for features we know are necessary and well-defined.

[1] https://basecamp.com/shapeup