Weekly sprint, candidate’s questionnaire and cardboard man
Hello! My name is Stas, I am the Product Owner of the “Welcome Aboard” team. We make a convenient product for applicants who want to work in Alfa-Bank.
Why do you need this product? To make the process of communication of candidates with the bank more pleasant and more efficient at every step. In addition, it saves time for our recruiters, and a satisfied recruiter is always good.
Now we are focusing on the electronic form of the applicant. It has more than 50 fields, it is divided into 6 steps and works on any device.
')
Under the cut, I will talk about the team composition, the solutions we use and why we need a cardboard guy in the team.
We make the product according to the Scrum and Agile methodology. All decisions on the product (how it will look, what the functions will be, how we promote it and position it, in general, in fact, everything) are made only within the team, independently. The workflow is based on weekly sprints.
It all started about a year ago, in the winter. Then Chief Employee Officer Sasha Averin believed in my idea and helped find the starting budget. Already in the summer, in June, I was able to leave the designer’s work, because Ivan Rockbee Vasiliev let me go to the products, and it started to happen.
A month later, in July, frontend and java-developers appeared in the team.
The MVP was ready in September, but since we are still a Bank and we have security guys, we rolled it out to users only in October.
And now - the diary of one week sprint in our team.
This is the beginning of any week. And I'm not only talking about Monday - I'm talking about planning. On the plan, we take in the development of the tasks loaded by us last week. What is grooming - will be clarified in the chapter “Thursday”, but if that - we do not mow dogs. At least at work.
In addition, the sprint goal is set on Monday, this is important. Therefore it is necessary.
What is the goal of the sprint? This is the value that we bring to our users at the end of the development week. For the current sprint, this “To enable the applicant to conveniently indicate in the questionnaire his past name, if he changed them”.
It is held on Monday after planning and then every day. It takes about 15 minutes. At the stand-stand we quickly determine who and what exactly will do today (each for himself).
Then, as a ouner, I held two meetings with stakeholders (for half an hour), went to training (2 hours). I met with recruiters and made an appointment with the security officers to introduce a new feature.
As a designer today did nothing)
He is resting somewhere, and we are looking for him! He is fun and able to solve problems and, of course, React knows best of all. By the way, here's a vacancy - let's ask questions in lichku.
So far, instead of a front-end, we have a cardboard man. We call him Igor.
In the morning our server began to reboot every hour, the inaccessibility of the service was formed. Tyoma found a possible reason and corrected it by playing around with the parameters of our cloud service (a cloud inside the Bank's infrastructure). We are waiting for tomorrow morning.
Today, after repairing the server, Tyoma started taking tasks from the sprint goal.
Looks like yesterday's bug is fixed. The server no longer reboots. Tyoma today added new beautiful graphics to Kibana to monitor suspicious activities of our microservices and detect bugs. Each such case is fixed, tested and eliminated, making the system more resilient.
Tyoma added on the server the processing logic of several full names. If I, as an applicant, changed my full names, then I can enter the old ones at the front, then, after decryption, they are converted by microservice to the requirements of the receiving system and are pushed into the base. It turns out that our candidates often change the name, even several times.
Petya was - Masha became. The number of such cases is truly huge :-)
Otpuuuusk! Today we understood / remembered / reconciled with the fact that Artem goes on vacation from Monday for 2 weeks. The SAP system, in which we will coordinate vacations and much more (no paper!), Kindly reminded him of this. The only programmer of our team (not counting the cardboard frontend) will be unavailable for 2 weeks, and dozens of people already use the service daily. Good service should not fall! In general, tomorrow Tyoma will teach me to administer our cluster and reanimate it, if that. I mean, server.
Igor (yes, cardboard frontend) for some reason did not agree to code in Java without a Theme. Well, okay, he is full of interesting work and so. A large backlog of complex logic modifications at the front has been accumulated. Thanks to caring users. For example, now many users are mistaken in stating their experience in the questionnaire, often not all places are indicated, but we need 5 years. Accordingly, it is necessary to show the user a widget that, as you fill in the work experience, would calculate the total length of service and show whether you need to specify more places, or enough.
Well, in fact, the task of this sprint is to file the ability to add / remove cards with the values of past names. Would you like to work with such puzzles and a cool library of components for React? Vacancy . By the way, our library is open - alfa-laboratory.imtqy.com/arui-feather/styleguide
Come to us front! Igor is such a good dude, but a little annoying that he does not laugh at our jokes. And obviously exaggerated about his skill “Communication skills” in the resume.
Today, an unusually early day began for me, was at 8:30 in the office (I usually arrive at 10). I had a couple of meetings with users (I’m going through the following userstory for 2018), it was productive.
Then stand up. Then he corrected the texts of the letters for automatic distribution by our service to recruiters. Wrapped them up in html. I make up, by the way, in Atom. After - a short meeting about the optimization of some processes, boredom, but necessary.
Then he facilitated a two-hour kanban for products in HR. We all have more than 20 digital products, so it was hot. We also lead the board in Trello. The purpose of the event is to be everything in the subject, who does what and where, in order to reuse and not do extra work. The event paid off with interest. Found several important intersections. We spend every 2 weeks. Then came to another office. Communication with the team. And now 20:37.
Today, telephone terrorism has reached Alpha. Someone (and this is always a bad person) called and said that everything was mined, without specifying what it was. As a result, offices and almost all Alpha offices in Moscow were evacuated. At that time I was moving between them, so I was not touched. But in general, prevented the work of colleagues.
Our team has a good habit of answering the question “Do we believe in a sprint goal?” Every day at the stand-up. Believe it. While all according to plan. This means that we believe that the sprint goal will be fulfilled, and on Friday's demo we will show our users updates.
The main - candidates, secondary - recruiters and managers. A clear prioritization helps a lot in work. For example, when it is necessary to improve some kind of process in which both Central Asia participate, we always first come up with a solution for applicants. Sawing. We measure, whether it was possible to improve. If everything is ok, then we think how to simplify the same process for recruiters. This principle helps us to fit voluminous user history into a weekly sprint, quickly confirm or disprove hypotheses and, as a result, constantly roll out improvements for users. Also saves a lot of PO time for prioritization.
We were lucky. Our stakeholders trust our team and do not set us tasks. We know the problems that our applicants face best at the Bank. Based on this knowledge, as well as the capabilities of the team at the moment, we ourselves build our priorities and take tasks into work.
When starting a startup, I conducted more than 25 in-depth interviews with applicants, new employees, those who refused us and those whom we refused. In the interview, we literally went through the whole process of employment with a candidate. They found out what actions he was taking and what he felt at the same time ... It turned out that I was going to make an unnecessary product at all!
In the initial idea of a startup, which I presented to the top managers of the bank, and for the implementation of which I was given money, I planned to solve the problems of applicants by making a nice product, where they could see what employment status they are in and what is to come. And the manager and the recruiter would see a dashboard with their applicants and beautiful tsiferkami to understand at any point in time, at what stage who is.
When money was given, in the first week of work in a startup I talked with our researcher Maria Goncharova and realized that it would be nice to spend a custdev (thanks, Masha !!!) and check my assumptions about user problems.
So, after I conducted in-depth interviews and compiled the Customer Journey Map of the applicant (by the way, I did just in Exsel, which is much more convenient than beautiful third-party services), it turned out that the candidates are not at all sick. It was extremely disappointing. The vision of the product had to be revised. Scrum Now I do an interview every week.
Actually, now you have to guess why we are doing exactly the electronic questionnaire of the applicant and whatnot beyond the limits of the digital product. That's right, because the client knows better what hurts him, you just need to be able to ask him correctly.
We have two team sports. Tyoma always won in chess, I'm in table tennis. But, interestingly, after 4 months of working together, we both advanced noticeably and now have become interesting rivals for each other. We learn from each other. These are engineering practices.
Tyom with Igor (yes, he really helps in work and is pleasant in communication) today redid the first step of the questionnaire on the front end. We have configured continuous integration using Jenkins, so updates will quickly come to battle. It saves time. Freed, the guys played three blitz chess games, and all three Igor leaked in the opening.
Tyom doesn’t like to fight a weak rival. It seems we need a new, more experienced frontend.
Artem Grinko came unusually agitated and immediately ran to the computer. This alarmed. Not in vain.
The failure alert system worked - deadlock in the database ... Nothing serious, as it turned out. They came up with a solution while drinking coffee.
And Tyoma today talked with colleagues from the security block by jabber (he has a phone in another office) on the authorization of hr-s from the regions as part of our integration with their system. It turned out to agree and modify our microservice on Spring Boot in 15 minutes! Now nothing prevents us from carrying value to users in a greater number of regions.
In the photo, the weekly event of Scrum teams is grooming. On it, we decide exactly how we will deliver the value to users in the next sprints.
That is, we split the userstory into small tasks. Moreover, each member of the development team decides for himself how best he is. For example, userstory: “I, as a job seeker, want to attach a photo of my passport right in the application form” split into 11 tasks for the front, middle and designer.
We use stickers on grooming, which the Scrum-master translates into electronic treas in later on.
I was asked here - how did it happen that such a small team has its own (albeit 1/4 rate) Scrum master. But absolutely on their own initiative. Tanya worked as a recruiter, wanted to develop as a scram and offered to help us as a startup to set up processes. After hours.
I liked the idea, and we have been together for almost 3 months. Now Tanya has moved to a new position with a complex name and is already helping a whole group of teams with the processes.
Tanya is well done.
This is a special part of Product Owner’s work that takes enough time and energy. After all, the selection of the team, its inspiration and effectiveness - this is precisely the responsibility of the PO.
I did not understand this before, and I thought that someone must provide me with such a pretty, friendly team ready for work with rosy cheeks. Not. The team needs to be created and it requires a lot of energy. Believe it.
We have one simple rule in a startup - you can teach the technique, but closeness in spirit - no. A startup needs dreamers, a little adventurers. We should be able to let money down the drain, and on the other hand, count every penny, believe in crazy ideas, but understand perfectly how we will do it.
And I did not say? We are looking for a system analyst. What? No, not Igor. So, today was the second interview with ... I will not disclose the names.
In general, for two months now we are interviewing analysts, and so far we have not found a decent one. Either the guys without any experience and logic in their heads, or hardened waterfall specialists with good 20 years of experience, but who do not fit into the startup team. We have no special requirements.
The main thing is that a person fits into a team, logically thinks, understands databases, and would be moderately boring (very necessary for writing technical documentation).
Yes, we are not hipsters with beards, vape and smoothies. But burgers love, especially when the sprint was successfully closed.
She performed. New features to add past (up to 10 pcs.) Combinations of name - in battle. There is a feeling that we have slightly overestimated the complexity of the task, but it is not surprising, since it is mainly front-line, and Igor is not very talkative lately. As a result, a couple more debts were fixed according to the code.
Every Friday we have a demo. On it, we demonstrate to users and stakeholders everything we have done during the current sprint. We do this by showing the interface, not the pictures or even the screencast. Following the results of the demo, we get very valuable feedback from our users, write down all the problems that they encountered, in order to later structure them and add them to the backlog.
Our users, filling out the questionnaire, must specify the name of their parents. At the same time, there are interesting cases when, for example, from the point of view of the law, the father of a person is one, but in fact he considers the Pope to be a completely different person.
We need to get information from the point of view of the law. Such “legitimate” information is exactly contained in your birth certificate, which shows the data of the father and mother. We came up with a brilliant decision - in the comments to the field indicate, “Mother. Data, as in the birth certificate "... DON'T TESTED and quickly filed it out!
Do you think that we began to send 80% of users? That's right, mother's maiden name.
We thought about the tester of the user, and the users perceived it as the testimony of the mother. And they were right.
Conclusion - even the most clear solutions to the team (including copyright) must be tested on users.
In general, somehow we live.
By the way, if suddenly one of you has the confidence that you will be able to come in for an interview and deal with the cardboard Igor in terms of technical skills (or at least play chess), come .
And yes, if you have questions about how to work in the digital division of the bank in general, how much Agile and Scrum get accustomed to, how we build teams and so on - I will be happy to answer them.
Why do you need this product? To make the process of communication of candidates with the bank more pleasant and more efficient at every step. In addition, it saves time for our recruiters, and a satisfied recruiter is always good.
Now we are focusing on the electronic form of the applicant. It has more than 50 fields, it is divided into 6 steps and works on any device.
')
Under the cut, I will talk about the team composition, the solutions we use and why we need a cardboard guy in the team.
Team
- Stanislav Semin (yes, it's me) - product owner, designer
- Artem Grinko - Java-developer and analyst.
- Tanya Trifitseva - scrum-master
- Cardboard man (we affectionately call him Igor) - frontend
We make the product according to the Scrum and Agile methodology. All decisions on the product (how it will look, what the functions will be, how we promote it and position it, in general, in fact, everything) are made only within the team, independently. The workflow is based on weekly sprints.
It all started about a year ago, in the winter. Then Chief Employee Officer Sasha Averin believed in my idea and helped find the starting budget. Already in the summer, in June, I was able to leave the designer’s work, because Ivan Rockbee Vasiliev let me go to the products, and it started to happen.
A month later, in July, frontend and java-developers appeared in the team.
The MVP was ready in September, but since we are still a Bank and we have security guys, we rolled it out to users only in October.
And now - the diary of one week sprint in our team.
Monday
Planing
This is the beginning of any week. And I'm not only talking about Monday - I'm talking about planning. On the plan, we take in the development of the tasks loaded by us last week. What is grooming - will be clarified in the chapter “Thursday”, but if that - we do not mow dogs. At least at work.
In addition, the sprint goal is set on Monday, this is important. Therefore it is necessary.
What is the goal of the sprint? This is the value that we bring to our users at the end of the development week. For the current sprint, this “To enable the applicant to conveniently indicate in the questionnaire his past name, if he changed them”.
Stand up
It is held on Monday after planning and then every day. It takes about 15 minutes. At the stand-stand we quickly determine who and what exactly will do today (each for himself).
Product Owner
Then, as a ouner, I held two meetings with stakeholders (for half an hour), went to training (2 hours). I met with recruiters and made an appointment with the security officers to introduce a new feature.
As a designer today did nothing)
Frontend
He is resting somewhere, and we are looking for him! He is fun and able to solve problems and, of course, React knows best of all. By the way, here's a vacancy - let's ask questions in lichku.
So far, instead of a front-end, we have a cardboard man. We call him Igor.
Bug
In the morning our server began to reboot every hour, the inaccessibility of the service was formed. Tyoma found a possible reason and corrected it by playing around with the parameters of our cloud service (a cloud inside the Bank's infrastructure). We are waiting for tomorrow morning.
Java
Today, after repairing the server, Tyoma started taking tasks from the sprint goal.
Tuesday
Bug
Looks like yesterday's bug is fixed. The server no longer reboots. Tyoma today added new beautiful graphics to Kibana to monitor suspicious activities of our microservices and detect bugs. Each such case is fixed, tested and eliminated, making the system more resilient.
Java
Tyoma added on the server the processing logic of several full names. If I, as an applicant, changed my full names, then I can enter the old ones at the front, then, after decryption, they are converted by microservice to the requirements of the receiving system and are pushed into the base. It turns out that our candidates often change the name, even several times.
Petya was - Masha became. The number of such cases is truly huge :-)
Vacation
Otpuuuusk! Today we understood / remembered / reconciled with the fact that Artem goes on vacation from Monday for 2 weeks. The SAP system, in which we will coordinate vacations and much more (no paper!), Kindly reminded him of this. The only programmer of our team (not counting the cardboard frontend) will be unavailable for 2 weeks, and dozens of people already use the service daily. Good service should not fall! In general, tomorrow Tyoma will teach me to administer our cluster and reanimate it, if that. I mean, server.
Frontend
Igor (yes, cardboard frontend) for some reason did not agree to code in Java without a Theme. Well, okay, he is full of interesting work and so. A large backlog of complex logic modifications at the front has been accumulated. Thanks to caring users. For example, now many users are mistaken in stating their experience in the questionnaire, often not all places are indicated, but we need 5 years. Accordingly, it is necessary to show the user a widget that, as you fill in the work experience, would calculate the total length of service and show whether you need to specify more places, or enough.
Well, in fact, the task of this sprint is to file the ability to add / remove cards with the values of past names. Would you like to work with such puzzles and a cool library of components for React? Vacancy . By the way, our library is open - alfa-laboratory.imtqy.com/arui-feather/styleguide
Come to us front! Igor is such a good dude, but a little annoying that he does not laugh at our jokes. And obviously exaggerated about his skill “Communication skills” in the resume.
Product Owner
Today, an unusually early day began for me, was at 8:30 in the office (I usually arrive at 10). I had a couple of meetings with users (I’m going through the following userstory for 2018), it was productive.
Then stand up. Then he corrected the texts of the letters for automatic distribution by our service to recruiters. Wrapped them up in html. I make up, by the way, in Atom. After - a short meeting about the optimization of some processes, boredom, but necessary.
Then he facilitated a two-hour kanban for products in HR. We all have more than 20 digital products, so it was hot. We also lead the board in Trello. The purpose of the event is to be everything in the subject, who does what and where, in order to reuse and not do extra work. The event paid off with interest. Found several important intersections. We spend every 2 weeks. Then came to another office. Communication with the team. And now 20:37.
Evacuation
Today, telephone terrorism has reached Alpha. Someone (and this is always a bad person) called and said that everything was mined, without specifying what it was. As a result, offices and almost all Alpha offices in Moscow were evacuated. At that time I was moving between them, so I was not touched. But in general, prevented the work of colleagues.
Believe in the sprint goal
Our team has a good habit of answering the question “Do we believe in a sprint goal?” Every day at the stand-up. Believe it. While all according to plan. This means that we believe that the sprint goal will be fulfilled, and on Friday's demo we will show our users updates.
Wednesday
The target audience
The main - candidates, secondary - recruiters and managers. A clear prioritization helps a lot in work. For example, when it is necessary to improve some kind of process in which both Central Asia participate, we always first come up with a solution for applicants. Sawing. We measure, whether it was possible to improve. If everything is ok, then we think how to simplify the same process for recruiters. This principle helps us to fit voluminous user history into a weekly sprint, quickly confirm or disprove hypotheses and, as a result, constantly roll out improvements for users. Also saves a lot of PO time for prioritization.
The trust
We were lucky. Our stakeholders trust our team and do not set us tasks. We know the problems that our applicants face best at the Bank. Based on this knowledge, as well as the capabilities of the team at the moment, we ourselves build our priorities and take tasks into work.
Research
When starting a startup, I conducted more than 25 in-depth interviews with applicants, new employees, those who refused us and those whom we refused. In the interview, we literally went through the whole process of employment with a candidate. They found out what actions he was taking and what he felt at the same time ... It turned out that I was going to make an unnecessary product at all!
Admit mistakes
In the initial idea of a startup, which I presented to the top managers of the bank, and for the implementation of which I was given money, I planned to solve the problems of applicants by making a nice product, where they could see what employment status they are in and what is to come. And the manager and the recruiter would see a dashboard with their applicants and beautiful tsiferkami to understand at any point in time, at what stage who is.
When money was given, in the first week of work in a startup I talked with our researcher Maria Goncharova and realized that it would be nice to spend a custdev (thanks, Masha !!!) and check my assumptions about user problems.
So, after I conducted in-depth interviews and compiled the Customer Journey Map of the applicant (by the way, I did just in Exsel, which is much more convenient than beautiful third-party services), it turned out that the candidates are not at all sick. It was extremely disappointing. The vision of the product had to be revised. Scrum Now I do an interview every week.
Application Form
Actually, now you have to guess why we are doing exactly the electronic questionnaire of the applicant and whatnot beyond the limits of the digital product. That's right, because the client knows better what hurts him, you just need to be able to ask him correctly.
Chess and tennis
We have two team sports. Tyoma always won in chess, I'm in table tennis. But, interestingly, after 4 months of working together, we both advanced noticeably and now have become interesting rivals for each other. We learn from each other. These are engineering practices.
Frontend
Tyom with Igor (yes, he really helps in work and is pleasant in communication) today redid the first step of the questionnaire on the front end. We have configured continuous integration using Jenkins, so updates will quickly come to battle. It saves time. Freed, the guys played three blitz chess games, and all three Igor leaked in the opening.
Tyom doesn’t like to fight a weak rival. It seems we need a new, more experienced frontend.
Thursday
Morning
Artem Grinko came unusually agitated and immediately ran to the computer. This alarmed. Not in vain.
The failure alert system worked - deadlock in the database ... Nothing serious, as it turned out. They came up with a solution while drinking coffee.
And Tyoma today talked with colleagues from the security block by jabber (he has a phone in another office) on the authorization of hr-s from the regions as part of our integration with their system. It turned out to agree and modify our microservice on Spring Boot in 15 minutes! Now nothing prevents us from carrying value to users in a greater number of regions.
Grooming (aha)
In the photo, the weekly event of Scrum teams is grooming. On it, we decide exactly how we will deliver the value to users in the next sprints.
That is, we split the userstory into small tasks. Moreover, each member of the development team decides for himself how best he is. For example, userstory: “I, as a job seeker, want to attach a photo of my passport right in the application form” split into 11 tasks for the front, middle and designer.
We use stickers on grooming, which the Scrum-master translates into electronic treas in later on.
Scrum master
I was asked here - how did it happen that such a small team has its own (albeit 1/4 rate) Scrum master. But absolutely on their own initiative. Tanya worked as a recruiter, wanted to develop as a scram and offered to help us as a startup to set up processes. After hours.
I liked the idea, and we have been together for almost 3 months. Now Tanya has moved to a new position with a complex name and is already helping a whole group of teams with the processes.
Tanya is well done.
Your team
This is a special part of Product Owner’s work that takes enough time and energy. After all, the selection of the team, its inspiration and effectiveness - this is precisely the responsibility of the PO.
I did not understand this before, and I thought that someone must provide me with such a pretty, friendly team ready for work with rosy cheeks. Not. The team needs to be created and it requires a lot of energy. Believe it.
We have one simple rule in a startup - you can teach the technique, but closeness in spirit - no. A startup needs dreamers, a little adventurers. We should be able to let money down the drain, and on the other hand, count every penny, believe in crazy ideas, but understand perfectly how we will do it.
Analyst
And I did not say? We are looking for a system analyst. What? No, not Igor. So, today was the second interview with ... I will not disclose the names.
In general, for two months now we are interviewing analysts, and so far we have not found a decent one. Either the guys without any experience and logic in their heads, or hardened waterfall specialists with good 20 years of experience, but who do not fit into the startup team. We have no special requirements.
The main thing is that a person fits into a team, logically thinks, understands databases, and would be moderately boring (very necessary for writing technical documentation).
Friday
Burgers
Yes, we are not hipsters with beards, vape and smoothies. But burgers love, especially when the sprint was successfully closed.
Sprint goal
She performed. New features to add past (up to 10 pcs.) Combinations of name - in battle. There is a feeling that we have slightly overestimated the complexity of the task, but it is not surprising, since it is mainly front-line, and Igor is not very talkative lately. As a result, a couple more debts were fixed according to the code.
Demo
Every Friday we have a demo. On it, we demonstrate to users and stakeholders everything we have done during the current sprint. We do this by showing the interface, not the pictures or even the screencast. Following the results of the demo, we get very valuable feedback from our users, write down all the problems that they encountered, in order to later structure them and add them to the backlog.
Not tested
Our users, filling out the questionnaire, must specify the name of their parents. At the same time, there are interesting cases when, for example, from the point of view of the law, the father of a person is one, but in fact he considers the Pope to be a completely different person.
We need to get information from the point of view of the law. Such “legitimate” information is exactly contained in your birth certificate, which shows the data of the father and mother. We came up with a brilliant decision - in the comments to the field indicate, “Mother. Data, as in the birth certificate "... DON'T TESTED and quickly filed it out!
Do you think that we began to send 80% of users? That's right, mother's maiden name.
We thought about the tester of the user, and the users perceived it as the testimony of the mother. And they were right.
Conclusion - even the most clear solutions to the team (including copyright) must be tested on users.
Total
In general, somehow we live.
By the way, if suddenly one of you has the confidence that you will be able to come in for an interview and deal with the cardboard Igor in terms of technical skills (or at least play chess), come .
And yes, if you have questions about how to work in the digital division of the bank in general, how much Agile and Scrum get accustomed to, how we build teams and so on - I will be happy to answer them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/344240/
All Articles