A great idea, and no confidence the team could build it

The owner had a great idea for a new product. The sales team was ready to go and marketing was on a roll. But he had very little confidence that his dev team could deliver a product to market that would work.

A codebase built by a team five times bigger

The codebase was inherited from pre-Covid times, when the team was five times bigger. For several years the team had hardly been able to maintain it. It became the biggest risk to the company's rollout.

What I found inside the team:

• The reporting frightened the team. Hours were the only metric checked on a regular basis, so everyone was busier figuring out how to log their hours properly than with the work itself.
• Formally, sprints were in place. In fact, sprint goals were missed from sprint to sprint, and in the middle of every sprint developers were pulled away by hotfixes.
• Deployment was messy, with cherry-picking and a lot of manual control.
• Product managers didn't really know how the legacy code worked. Its hundreds of existing parameters often created a lot of mess for clients.

From individuals to teams that own a result

It was one year of hands-on involvement.

We started by getting development unstuck. That took hard decisions, like fully stopping new features to fix the critical bugs that were paralyzing the whole company.

1. PrioritiesI taught the dev team to think in business priorities when deciding the order of work.
2. The teamI shook up the existing team a little. First of all, the informal leaders changed. Some people were let go, and a very few new ones were hired.
3. StructureI structured the work into internal teams of product manager, devs and QAs. Instead of hour tracking and personal metrics, I introduced goal setting, responsibility and metrics for the whole team.
4. Product managersI taught the product managers by example to understand the system and operations before jumping into writing tasks.
5. Knowledge baseWe improved the knowledge base about the system.
6. MindsetI brought in a responsibility mindset: each person became responsible for what they understand and can influence.

The product was rolled out on time and reached over 100K MRR within several months

At the yearly company meeting, the owner told the team it was the first time in the company's history that there were no questions about production.