Sonnen | Scrum Master & Agile Coach

Project facts: Company: Sonnen GmbH (subsidiary of Shell) Company Size: ~2k employees Domain: Software development & Data visualization Team composition:1x UX/UI Designer, 1x Front End Developer, 2x Full Stack Developer, 1x Business Analyst, 1x Product Owner, 1x Project Manager Techstack: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, MongoDB, Gitlab, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Jira, Confluence Method of collaboration: Scrum, later Kanban   Key learning: There is nothing more insightful than talking to your users.   Main challenges: Dependencies to other parts of the organization with much longer planning and release cycles.   Main successes: Doubling the number of users by greatly increasing the usability of the product. Establishing continuous product discovery activities including weekly user interviews.

The Story: From March 2023 until March 2024 I supported a crossfunctional team at Sonnen GmbH as a Scrum Master. We were responsible for a software called Device Tool. It helps diagnose and solve customer issues with Sonnen’s IOT Products, mainly home batteries for storing solar energy. Support agents all over the world use the device tool every day.

The device Tool visualizes the state of the installed hard and software, the current and historical status of various parameters, and any active alarms and warnings. It can also be used to remotely give commands to the products.

A single developer, supported by a business analyst and the product owner built the first version of the Device Tool. Just before I joined, the team had grown to eight people in total (including myself). Our task was to improve on the first release, make the product more usable and thus grow the userbase.

The team was great. Most members were motivated and always wanted to contribute. The thing I enjoyed most were our weekly design review sessions where every single person took part and contributed. The energy and the results were fantastic and so motivating.

Unfortunately, some team members had additional responsibilities. We ended up with a cross functional core team that did most of the daily work. Others contributed when they could. Since the Product Owner had a lot of things on his plate, I also frequently took on his role.

My initial focus with the team was to stabilize the Scrum process and support the product owner in his day-to-day activities. We soon realized that Scrum wasn’t ideal for our situation and decided to switch to a Kanban approach.

The main challenge we encountered throughout my time at Sonnen was dealing with teams we were dependent on. The problem was that some were (rightfully!) focused on other topics. Moreover, some had a much longer planning and release cycle. We were moving fast and thus often frustrated because we didn’t get what we needed in time.

To make a long story short, we ended up focusing on those things that were fully in our control and ignoring those solutions where we needed input. While this meant we couldn’t deliver some seemingly important features as soon as we had hoped, we were still able to deliver plenty of value by focusing on what we could control. In the end, I think this worked out great for all involved.

Once Scrum was running smoothly, I introduced the team to Continous Product Discovery practices as popularized by Teresa Torres. I didn’t have to convince anyone to try it out (again: awesome, motivated team) and we simply started interviewing. Since all of our users were company internal, we had no problems recruiting participants for weekly interviews that we conducted throughout my assignment.

We also built an Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) that visualized our users’ issues. In an in-person workshop that I organized and moderated we not only did team building exercises but also worked with our OST. We selected an opportunity to address, came up with possible solutions, created the user story maps, defined the underlying assumptions and tested the most important ones.

The introduction of continuous discovery practices was surely my most important contribution to the team. There simply is nothing more insightful than seeing a user interact with your product. So many unconscious assumptions about our users go into product design decisions. Many of them aren’t correct. It’s also incredibly motivating for the team to see the product helping a user. I can’t begin to explain the energy I felt in the team after the first interview we conducted.

With the help of continuous discovery, we greatly introduced the usability of the Device Tool and ended up doubling the amount of daily active users. I am very proud of the results we achieved and even more proud that the weekly user interviews were still going on more than six months after I was no longer at Sonnen.