Your team has successfully released your minimum viable product (MVP) – it’s time to celebrate! But as the celebration winds down, it’s crucial to start planning how to push your product into production while continuing to innovate and build the next version. With your idea resonating in the market, other companies are entering the same space, increasing competition and pressure. The stakes are rising, and your team needs to adapt. What you need is an adaptive teaming approach.
The Challenge Post-MVP Release
Perhaps you’ve been utilizing an Agile scrum approach, where a small team works in short cycles (one to two weeks) to develop features iteratively. This team maintains a list of tasks, known as a backlog, which is regularly updated to prioritize work for each cycle. However, once your product is in production, a new challenge emerges. The infrastructure, technical debt (outstanding work that needs to be addressed), and bug fixes for the work in production must now be maintained while the product continues to evolve.
Product ownership often isn’t considered during the initial iterations of product development. The momentum to innovate and get things working creates a tight-knit team that gets things done. You might feel like you can’t afford to peel off anyone to own the product once it goes into production. You might consider hiring a new team focused on DevOps (development and operations) to maintain the production environment. The problem with that approach is that they are not the builders of the product. When issues arise, they still need to rely on the feature team, disrupting ongoing sprint (development cycle) goals.
Introducing Adaptive Teaming
Adaptive teaming offers a model that allows your team to evolve with your product without needing to double its size. This approach emphasizes flexibility, continuous learning, and the ability to adapt to changing market conditions. By rotating roles and responsibilities within the team, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, and integrating customer feedback, adaptive teaming ensures that your team remains dynamic and resilient.
The adaptive teaming model also encourages a self-service automation approach at the feature team level regarding infrastructure setup and management, This means that going into production, having a DevOps function is essential. For instance, the development team might construct individual containers and their contents, but it may require a DevOps function, whether an individual or an outsourced service, to support the product team with a self-service container management platform. This setup allows the DevOps role to serve as a support function, enabling feature teams to deploy and manage their products effectively without the need for a large, dedicated DevOps team. Effective DevOps is a topic for another blog post, though, and I only mention it because it provides a critical support function that allows developments teams to be adaptive.
By incorporating adaptive teaming, your organization can maintain a lean structure while still meeting the evolving demands of product development and infrastructure management. This approach not only saves costs but also enhances collaboration, innovation, and overall team performance.
The Journey Model
For the dynamic needs of a growing product, adaptive teaming introduces the Journey Model. For an average team of 5 to 7 generalists (team members with a broad range of skills) working on a product together, the Journey Model asks one or two of those people to stay in a “basecamp” while the rest of the team goes on a “hike.” Each iteration of feature development work becomes a hike, and the people in basecamp provide the product support and maintenance for that iteration, allowing the hikers to concentrate on delivering new value.
When the iteration, or hike, is over, the whole team reconvenes to review their progress, update the backlog, and determine the next hiking and basecamp parties. The hikers use a structured approach to commit to a set number of tasks, while those in basecamp maintain a flexible list of tasks (like a Kanban board) to manage and prioritize requests daily. The basecamp team ensures they focus on the highest priority issues by limiting the amount of work they handle at once.
Roles and Responsibilities
The part of the team on the hike relies on a prioritized list of tasks managed by a product owner or manager, who connects with customers and stakeholders to determine the highest value features and tasks. Once the sprint backlog is created, the hikers focus exclusively on those tasks while the product owner continues to refine and update the backlog based on stakeholder feedback. The basecamp team handles critical bug fixes first, then technical debt and documentation, and also manages incoming requests, deciding whether they should be handled immediately or added to the product backlog for future sprints.
Benefits of Adaptive Teaming
- Avoids Developing Silos: Adaptive teaming prevents the isolation of knowledge by rotating team members between basecamp and hiking roles, ensuring that everyone gains exposure to different aspects of the product. This approach breaks down barriers and ensures that no single team member holds all the knowledge about a specific area.
- Saves Money: Adaptive teaming allows your team to evolve with the product without the immediate need for expansion. By optimizing team member allocation and leveraging the existing team’s diverse skills, companies can avoid the high costs associated with hiring new staff while still effectively managing and improving the product.
- Creates a Knowledge-Sharing Culture: The continuous rotation and collaboration inherent in adaptive teaming foster a culture of learning and information exchange. Team members regularly share insights and skills, leading to a more informed and capable team that can adapt to changing demands and challenges.
- Enhances Product Quality and Value Delivery: With focused roles and responsibilities, critical tasks are prioritized, ensuring that the most important issues are addressed promptly. This structured approach enhances overall product quality and ensures that the team consistently delivers high-value features and improvements to customers.
- Encourages Continuous Learning: Adaptive teaming’s iterative nature promotes a continuous learning cycle at every product level. From stakeholder feedback to internal processes, team members constantly develop their skills and capabilities, leading to a more resilient and innovative organization.
Getting Started with Adaptive Teaming
Adaptive teaming puts learning and development at the center, making it an effective approach for startups and businesses exploring new product directions. By adopting adaptive teaming, you can avoid silos, save on immediate expansion costs, and create a dynamic, knowledge-sharing culture that drives innovation and growth.
To help you implement this transformative approach, Transformetic is offering a comprehensive workshop titled “Adaptive Teaming.” This workshop guides your team through the principles and practices of creating empowered, purpose-driven teams. It is structured into two sessions and provides practical exercises and actions to equip your team with the skills needed to thrive in a shifting, competitive landscape.
As a precursor to the workshop, we invite you to join one of our free one-hour webinars where we will introduce the core principles of adaptive teaming and give you a taste of what the full workshop offers. This webinar is a perfect opportunity to understand how adaptive teaming can benefit your organization and to get your questions answered.
If you’re not ready to dive into the webinar or workshop just yet, here’s a simple, safe-to-fail experiment you can try with your team: Rotate Roles for a Sprint. Choose a one or two-week sprint and have team members temporarily switch roles. For example, a developer could take on some project management tasks, while a tester could participate in development. This rotation can help team members gain new perspectives, foster empathy, and identify areas for improvement in communication and workflow.
For more information and to register for a webinar or workshop, visit Transformetic’s website.
In the meantime, stay tuned for more insights and updates on how to effectively implement adaptive teaming in your organization.
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