Program Strategy

As our team grew from 6 members to over 40, we had to scale our processes and ceremonies as well.

I assessed our current processes and team ceremonies and strategized how to better support our growing efforts. This required validation and alignment from the Tech Lead, Customer Experience Lead and Project Managers.

Initial State:

Our team was small enough for all members to be involved in every step of the process. We shared information easily during daily standup meetings and had regular, direct access to our main stakeholder. This made communication updates easy and team process smooth when we had to pivot.

Current State:

As the team continued to grow and stakeholder availability became more limited, team members began to feel confused by pivots and were not able to see a clearly defined goal.

Problem Statement: As a designer feel like I’m operating in a feature factory. I need to understand the bigger picture so I can support those goals when designing features.

I recommended that we define these goals, starting with a Vision Statement and confirm that all scrum tasks relate back to the program values.

I facilitated sessions to determine a vision statement for the team and followed up with sessions to define objectives and key results. I also recommended that we define these on a quarterly basis.

I identified how to prioritize feature requests from customers vs. requirements from stakeholders.

The below process displays how we currently iterate from vision statement all the way to user stories and tasks.