On 30th September I attended the Agile Leadership Day 20151 conference, held at GDI in Rüschlikon2.
During the day there were a number of half hour sessions happening in one of four tracks3 and visitors to the conference were able to choose which of the sessions they wanted to attend.
This first session I attended was hosted by Melissa Lang4 of Xing Barcelona, whose abstract for the talk read:
The Xing Barcelona office is currently home to 3 development teams comprised of people from all over the world. We are predominantly developers, and also have test engineers, agile project managers, user experience and visual design specialists. In the past two years the number of employees at Xing’s Barcelona office has nearly doubled in size.
In this talk I’ll describe how our leadership team has evolved and adapted to this growth. I’ll share the way we work and how we have embraced the belief that our teams are our product.
Some of the topics I’ll be discussing are: organic and sustainable growth; what our working agreements are and how we created them; how our values drive what we say and what we do; building our BLT backlog; and our pair-coaching sessions to help each other develop and grow into the best leaders we can be.
During lunch I had a chance to catch up with Mel, who was lots of fun to chat with. However, it was obvious from the beginning that there were a lot of differences between legacy organizations and Xing. Simple things like production release intervals. I feel that our team is pretty “agile” managing one or two production deployments a month. At Xing they are doing this each hour!
People at Xing are encouraged to experiment. If there is something holding them back in their work, change it, no need to get signoff from management first, collect evidence for a week or two showing improvements in quality, throughput, happiness, etc. then share the knowledge. I often feel that our team have roadblocks put in the way.
The main messages I also got from George Kohlrieser5 keynote was that we need to “dare to fail”. If we do not push on, we will be left behind.