Damien asked me to come on board to help him resolve delivery issues with their fledgeling SAAS product. He was dreading the next planning meeting and couldn’t see a way forward. As the technical team lead, Damien was good at maintaining a calm demeanour and warm smile, but behind that, he was anxious and feeling overwhelmed, unsure how to turn around the time-consuming discussions and poor team dynamics that characterised planning. It had gotten so bad that Damien confessed he was seriously thinking about moving on.
Before I started, we talked through what was happening – planning took an entire day to step through the tickets, discussing each one as they went, and on one occasion it spilled over to the following day. A few individuals dominated the discussions and some developers told him it was a waste of their time. Damien was feeling overwhelmed at having so many developers and was finding he barely ever had time to plan for planning meetings, the irony of which wasn’t lost.
However, it wasn’t always like this. The largely remote team used to enjoy meeting up in person and planning as a team. Everything had been going well until the commercial success of their fledgling SAAS product and an influx of investment put growth on the agenda. The team had expanded rapidly and the agile coach was dropped in by one of the VCs to help scale engineering capacity. However, Damien struggled to keep up with his own technical work whilst also managing the much bigger team, and the recent departure of the agile coach was the final straw.
I was sure we could turn this around, if I provided good technical support for Damien, and freed him up to focus on his leadership responsibilities – we agreed to give it three months then reassess.
I picked up the responsibility for planning meetings, ensuring sufficient tickets were well defined ahead of time. Damien’s anxiety reduced. I also transitioned much of the ‘on the day’ planning to regular refinement sessions ahead of time, attended by only those who needed to be there. Damien’s anxiety reduced further and he started enjoying his own work once again. Planning meetings reduced to about 2 – 3 hours, no one was bored or frustrated, and everyone enjoyed a good team lunch afterwards. After 3 months, when we’d bedded in the new ways of working, I eventually hired my own replacement and said goodbye to Damien, knowing things were working for him.
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