_Tech_stack_-_image_Copy.png)
As a business we use annual and quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to keep ourselves focused and aligned to the most important things that will drive our business forwards. The longer term strategic direction and the yearly “big moves” form the bases for our annual OKRs and are set by our Leadership team. OKRs are then developed cross functionally with input from various stakeholders and leaders from multiple teams across the business. These are then broken down into quarterly milestone markers which will ensure we are on track to achieve our aims for the year.
For our Tech and Product team, it really helps us to see how we’re contributing to the overall success of the business. We’ve previously trialed Tech OKRs too, but they didn’t work as well as we’d have liked so we decided to learn from that and change our approach. Now we have dedicated missions for each squad within our Tech and Product team. These missions align to our company OKRs so it is easy to see the impact of the squad on our business success.
We have a growing tech and product team which covers a variety of things including product engineering, platform engineering, data engineering, UX, IT Ops and so much more!
Each Squad has a mission and every squad is empowered to create their own roadmaps working with their key stakeholders and ensuring they are working on the most important thing.
We know the impact of technical debt and give our squads the autonomy to choose to tackle this in the best way for them, whether it is some tickets each cycle or a dedicated cycle each quarter.
We believe in cross functional, autonomous squads. This means that we aim for each squad to have the skillset it needs to deliver on their mission. For the product squads working on the Clinical Platform that comprises of product, design and tech roles. A typical product squad will have a Product Manager, Product Designers, Frontend and Backend Software Engineers of different levels as well as an Engineering Manager. We also have other roles across the wider team that support multiple squads such as User Researchers UX writers.
We work using Agile principles but don’t strictly follow any Scrum or Kanban methodologies, instead allowing each squad to be flexible to what works for them. We love learning from our experiences though so any iterations on squad processes are expected to make sure we’re constantly bettering ourselves. Some of our squads work in one week cycles where others prefer two. Some have dedicated refinement and backlog sessions, others have more informal preparation sessions.
The biggest things we advocate for are retrospectives and daily standups (and even some standups are asynchronous!). We love cross-squad collaboration too and have a few meetings across the team to facilitate this such as our fortnightly Tech and Product meeting for updates and celebrations, and our Engineering Team Meeting for all members working on the clinical platform to share demos, priorities and dependencies.
One initiative we have is our clinical shadowing sessions. These are run on a monthly basis and provide fascinating insight for members of our Tech and Product team to see our clinicians in action completing some of their regular sessions. This gives us invaluable insight as to how our clinicians use our clinical platform as well as our clients and often surface things that no amount of testing ever could!