Measuring & Increasing Team Productivity

Overview 🔎

When I joined Contra one of my early areas of focus was understanding how we prioritized, planned and executed on our projects & work. The good news I discovered quickly was quarterly planning was really well done within our product & engineering groups. When it came to shorter term planning & execution though, that was left up to each individual team and there was not a lot of consistency between them. At the time, our best for gauging productivity (and saving us from daily standup meetings) was reading & writing standup's via the geekbot.com Slack app.

Problem & Solution 🤝

My goal was to create an easy to understand & use method for communicating the complexity & volume of work associated with our tasks in Linear and improve our ability to deliver work in a predictable amount of time.

Goals: • Make estimating work easier & consistent across the product & tech org • Bring consistency to how teams plan their work • Increase the amount of work delivered within a time period

Process 🛣

Introduced a simplified version of story pointing into the organization, distributed documents on how to approach estimating work based on complexity of the task & the volume (amount) of work needed to be done.

Turned on one week Work Cycles within Linear.app, our task management tool, and educated leads & management on how short duration planning would improve delivery of our work within the time we committed to.

Worked with managers each week on how they approached grooming and planning their cycles to size the committed work to the amount they can realistically complete. This reduced over promising & under delivering.

Produce reports for managers to understand how work cycles went, week over week changes and highlight areas for improvement.

Establish our source of truth for work being done and the status is our tasks is in Linear, not other documents or communication tools. Ie, Progress updates happen within the Linear task rather than a slack thread.

Meet regularly with team leads to discuss approaches to planning & grooming and bring learnings & successful tactics to other teams.

Results 🎁

Within a few months every person within the product & tech organization was comfortable describing tasks in a consistent manner. When anyone in the organization looks at a task and see's the estimate they immediately understand the size & complexity and are confident the estimator used the same guideline for estimating.

All teams operate with the same 1 week work cycles, planning happens for all teams at the end of the week which allows our coworkers that start much earlier in the day on Monday to have a full slate of work ready for them.

All teams have a thorough understanding of their typical weekly velocity, break down their work into smaller tasks and discuss ways they can improve how they work within their retrospectives. The end result, our teams have seem dramatic improvement in the amount of work they are able to deliver within a one week period with teams increasing their deliverables by 40%-50% since the start of our initiative.