Speedboats: Sustaining Innovation and Engagement
I had written previously about ShipIt!. In a nutshell it is
- Once a quarter, one week long
- Unstructured time (teams self organize and choose what to work on)
- ‘USPS model’ applies — teams are expected to ship changes to production in a week
- ‘Lightning talks’ — every team gets 5 minutes for explaining the problem and demo the solution
ShipIt! is trajectory changing for every company and organization I have worked with. There is an aspect of self organized chaos and outcomes that is both liberating and focusing. I believe that every organization that wants to raise engagement and get to astonishing outcomes should have such an event.
What happens outside of ShipIt! though? Once the event is over, everyone returns to the usual program. Backlogs get groomed, sprints get determined — and the intense productivity drops. How do we continue to plumb the excitement that comes with ShipIt! ?
Part of the answer is — you don’t. Teams need break from excitement too. But there is a place for hackathons in regular development. I call them Speedboats.
Speedboats
The concept of speedboats is to help teams break through a barrier. There are circumstances in which teams get stuck
- A new team is formed
- There is a new tech stack to be understood
- The problem domain is not well understood
- The proposed solution has complexities that are not well understood
In short, there are projects which have significant unknowns. Unknowns cause teams to have doubt and skepticism. Speedboats are ShipIt! style hackathons to convert Unknowns into Knowns.
Structuring Speedboats
- Take time out of regularly scheduled sprints and convert to a Speedboat
- Embrace time constraints. Speedboats work well when it is 3 days or shorter
- Have a very clear outcome in mind — ‘This speedboat has reached it destination if X happens’
- Embrace shortcuts, hacks and whatever you can do — it is ok to consider the work as throwaway. The goal is to convert the unknown into a known by any means necessary
- Give teams the expertise they need. Free up a tech leader, a PM, a designer — whatever the team needs to be successful.
- Keep the team fed.
- Have a commitment & a readout to a senior leader. Commitments drive accountability. Readouts share out the learnings along the way
Speedboats slice through mental hurdles by allowing teams to do what it takes to build confidence. It is an extension of the regularly schedule ShipIt! — but unlike ShipIt!, decisions on speedboats are made locally by teams. It frees them up to tackle the hard problems up front.
Have you used a similar concept? What are your learnings from it? I’d love to learn.
