November 2020retailtechinsights.com8A common problem at e-commerce organisations is that the technology department is seen as a service centre for the commercial and marketing organisations, instead of a strategic function that can enable the business to succeed. Photobox was no exception when I joined which resulted in a disengaged technical workforce that struggled to have positive business impact. It was clear that we needed to change.Time to TransformWe jumped straight into implementing standard Agile methodologies combined with an OKR process for goal setting and initially mandating the use of Scrum for all teams before attempting a cross functional squad based approach. Goals were pushed down centrally through the OKR process.Over time, it became clear that none of these methods were driving the expected business impact and each had significant shortcomings. These included dogmatic approaches to change management, challenges with dependencies and high management overhead when scaling across all teams. I felt personally accountable for the stress these approaches were causing to our teams, it was clear that the top down approach to goal setting and following externally defined processes were not working. We needed something that was created entirely for our organisation.Goodbye Top Down ApproachA small group of senior product and technology leaders started debating what we believed the mindsets, constraints and environments were that contributed to high performing teams at scale. This was at times a challenging conversation due to differences in our beliefs to what contributed to past success.The output was a set of aspirational but achievable operating principles, put simply in our own words that would provide the basis for a wider debate and effective communication.Getting Leadership CommitmentOur principles were then used to write out in detail how the whole product and technology organisation would operate. Example topics include our approach to code ownership, platform investment, goal setting and the meetings necessary to make the operating model work.It was really important that this felt like an alpha version to gather effective feedback. Google Docs comment functionality combined with regular meetings enabled the entire product and technology leadership to engage in creating and debating the detail of our aspirational future state. Eventually we all either agreed or disagreed and committed.Tailoring to Each TeamWith leadership aligned, we began to work team by team on the transition. We placed huge emphasis on creating psychological safety at a team level, in order to have deep and specific conversations, allowing everyone to express their set of concerns. Our iterative approach was set up to be able to learn and adapt from feedback, and we added regular sessions to provide regular coaching and support.Our principles are based on increasing accountability by enabling autonomy within a set of mutually agreed constraints given to a set of small teams. Senior By David Jensen, Director of Ecommerce Engineering, PhotoboxAUTONOMY WITH CONSTRAINTS EMPOWERS TEAMS TO DELIVER RESULTSDavid JensenIn my opInIon
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