Note: This post is the 10th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Joe Heitzeberg who is our VP of Tech at WhitePages. He is charged with delivering the services and offerings that power the WhitePages experience, running a scaleable and efficient infrastructure and building and maintaining a top-notch tech team.
What is Agile Software Development?
I start this blog post off by revealing a secret: I nearly always ask interview candidates to define what Agile is, and the more prescriptive and exacting their answer, the lower the score they tend to get. You see, for WhitePages, Agile is not a prescriptive, exacting process and ruleset, it is a set of general principles and themes — much like branding.
If you’ve been following along with the brand building series, then you may see this and other parallels.
A sprint team meeting in progress.
Principles vs. Rules
In branding, it is important to establish and embrace a set of principles. For WhitePages, we established brand pillars based in part on our beliefs and aspirations. These include brand pillars such as “Relevant Innovation” which is the notion that WhitePages values speed of innovation and staying ahead of the curve.
Similarly, with Agile we developed a set of principles that help guide how we organize and accomplish the work of a top-50 website. These include:
- Empowerment: To deliver on our mission and goals, we realize that the people who truly make a difference are the folks who write code, create requirements, lead scrums, crank out wire-frames and designs and so forth. For us to be successful, we embrace “empowerment”, which means letting the six or seven Agile sprint team members have the ultimate responsibility and accountability in the success of our products.
- Transparency: To make sure that the hard work of agile team members doesn’t go unnoticed and unrecognized (and, okay I admit it – as a check and balance to staying on course) we embrace transparency.
- Problem Solving Mentality: To stay ahead of the curve and move fast, when we encounter problems or set-backs, we like to say, “Hey, we’re engineers, let’s solve it.” Problems with complaints aren’t worth much, but problems with solutions are invaluable. Likewise, great ideas without follow-through aren’t worth much, but going quickly from the whiteboard to the website is everything in the web.
- Being Together: One of the first things we did nine months ago when we moved to Agile was rip down the walls between everyone’s work spaces and move people away from their functional teams to sit with their cross-functional Agile teams. At first this caused some stress, but everyone quickly realized the benefits and great ideas that emerge when engineers are together with designers and so forth.
- Continuous Learning and Mistakes: We accept that pushing the curve upwards in speed, innovation and learning is what counts, and to get there we need to move fast and take risks. Thus, we will stumble and fall along the way. It’s okay. Like installing a new screen door for your patio, you chalk up the edges and bang them into the siding to figure out where you need to file the rough edges down.
As with brand pillars, there are no prescriptive rules and procedures to enforce – only general principles that allow freedom and creativity within some general constraints.
Substance vs. Surface
Just as branding is not principally about mascots, taglines and logos, Agile is not about techniques like pair-programming, a particular toolset or a specific team composition.
Sure, you might have a cartoon character as part of your logo, and this may feature prominently into your brand identity, just as you may use pair-programming as part of how you develop code within Agile, but these specific things do not define your brand or your agile process.
Just as brand is more about emotion than logos, Agile is more about culture than techniques. (I could write a whole other post about culture change and agile, but I’ll leave that for another day)
“We’re either insanely ambitious or just plain insane”
A few weeks before our site relaunch, I stopped by Alex’s (our CEO and founder) office to jokingly ask him if we were insane or just ambitious, and that we’ll only know after the site relaunch goes live.
So much has changed and been created under the hood as part of this latest site relaunch that we might have been crazy ambitious to take it on at once. Aside from our wholesale switch to Agile Project Management, consider this:
- Completely new front end platform in Ruby on Rails — not only was this a wholesale switch, but we did it knowing that with our scale we’d likely enter into the Top-5 (traffic) of any website using Rails.
- New deployment and config system – how the code we develop moves from system to system as it makes the way from a developer’s laptop to our website has been totally redone.
- New source control – how we manage changes to code and merging code from multiple developers across multiple projects was migrated to a new system.
- New data center – not only have we moved the physical location of our production servers, we also took the opportunity rewire the networking, storage and server components to make them more consistent, manageable and efficient.
The results of these efforts and the relaunch itself are already showing how the product and engineering team’s efforts deliver on the brand principles:
- Relevant Innovation: New systems enable us to deliver features to users significantly faster than before.
- Stewards of Trust: Our new source control and deployment architecture means a higher degree of dependability and reliability from release to release, ensuring smooth releases, minimal downtime and secure data.
- Best Source: Across the board performance increases of 20-to-40% mean that our users are able to get at the information they’re looking for much faster – strengthening our position as the best source on the web for people search.
Your Thoughts
Have you drawn parallels between agile methodology and branding at your company? Would you like to share what principles your organization has adopted to make agile work. We’re always learning and sharing what we learn, so please write me or comment below. Thank you!
Joe
Related posts:
