Ceremonies

Systems, frameworks and processes work. Delivery at Wednesday irrespective of the the service involves the following ceremonies that enable delivery of high quality digital products

Here's a link to a set of Sprint Ceremonies that enable alignment, high-quality and on-time delivery

And here's a link to a set of ceremonies that encourage Product Led Growth

Conduct the the following to encourage sharing, & smoother delivery

User Testing

Arrange user testing sessions where we get a group of people from the company to use the product that you’ve created. To start off with this can be folks from the HR, marketing, sales and engineering (other than the engineers on your team) department.

• Objective: We need to fix an objective for the session before it is conducted.

• Pre-framing & Preparation: We must pre-frame the session with information so people know what to expect. Share details in the calendar invite, slack messages, send installation instructions, etc.

• During the session: The project owner/lead should have a clear set of questions that they want to get answers to. Also, be prepared to answer your team's questions about the product for you.

• Post the session: Create a report showing what was observed or learnt and the steps taken. This way we can measure if those objectives were met the next time.

• Frequency: A cadence of 30 minutes per week.

Usability Testing

Arrange usability testing sessions where each workflow, error message, muscle memory, etc., is tested across users to ensure what we’re building is usable, intuitive and a good citizen in the ecosystem. We should measure the likelihood of performing intended actions and send out surveys with detailed descriptions of attendees' experiences.

Cross-Functional Workshops

These sessions are geared towards cross-functional sharing across the delivery team - the PMs, engineers, support personnel, testers & designers dissect the good, bad and ugly parts of the product and share their candid views and what should be better, things that should be included in the roadmap, and items that we should remove and no longer maintain.

Brown bag lunches

These are informal sharing sessions that need to be facilitated by Managers/Leads for intra-team sharing sessions. Use this to remove blind spots and democratise information about the project. Use it to share product and tech innovation opportunities. This isn’t a world is my oyster situation - it’s a bounded session where what we’re discussing affects and is part of the project that we’re on in some way or form.

Cross Product Audits

This practice fosters inter-team learning and encourages accountability. It involves performing external audits on products being built by the other teams at Wednesday. The team being audited prepares for the audit by providing all of the necessary documentation needed for an external audit. The audit duration is capped at a week and includes performance, security, conventions, coding practices, automation, and stability audits. The auditing team fills out a report and submits their findings and learnings.

Internal Governance Call

This is a review meeting. We look back on what was done within the last week and ensure we are on track, and we look ahead towards what's coming and ensure we're heading in the right direction. This is a checkpoint in your Sprint. We demo progress and accomplishments to the Engineering Project Head and run through any ideas or items that require clarity. Any items discussed here should be noted, and we should take steps to address this genre in the Backlog Groomings itself. This is a good avenue to discuss discrepancies in TRDs and/or explain comments on TRDs created in the previous week. Comments and directions on Audit results should be further discussed here.