[bdbcbc]

How much time have you invested into it as a skill set ?

Have you read product thinking, the lean startup, agile estimating and planning ?

How do you expect to leverage a methodology if you don’t do a deep dive and become an expert.

[n4r9]

Similar to the other reply, I don't manage people or drive the methodology changes.

I'm dev lead on a small (3 dev) sub-team within the larger platform team. We generally follow the same methodology as the rest of dev. They're reportedly following agile but it has the classic hallmarks of being driven by senior management: little/no training or education in agile (even in product), devs don't speak to clients, retros are consistently cancelled for lack of time, process changes are dictated by the product team (which is managed by the company's MD), etc... . I'm actually not convinced that the company can pull off agile. Partly because management don't understand it, and partly because our major business client are rigid about roadmaps and deadlines. Also partly because my own sub-team engages in research-heavy, long-term features. A lot of our work consists of thinking up blue-skies algorithm changes, trying them out, and going back to the drawing board if it doesn't pan out. Month-long iterations of work with potentially no viable changes after each one. When I read about agile it tends to describe stuff where you can muster up an MVP for a feature within a week or two at most, so it has been tricky to interpret how to apply it.

So basically, it's not working great and I have limited influence to change things. What I can do is fight my team's corner with well-backed arguments. E.g. there was recently a period of a few months where the entire platform team (~25 people) took part in a daily standup lasting 30 mins on average, on top of their own squad catchups. This was obviously wasteful but the engineering manager liked feeling ontop of things. After I repeatedly raised the issue, the frequency got dropped to weekly for my team and twice-weekly for the wider team. So I'm keen to learn more about agile vs alternative systems so I can continue to fight effectively my team's corner in this way. The ideal end-goal would be to extricate my team entirely from this half-baked agile mess, whether that means following agile more "correctly" or switching to something more bespoke. I appreciate the references and have started glancing through "Agile Estimations and Planning", it's okay so far but nothing revelatory. I don't have a lot of time to devote to this so I'm naturally skeptical of "just put in lots of hours of reading and I'm sure you'll see the benefit".

[JKCalhoun]

I wasn't the manager calling the shots. As an engineer though it will always be abominable to me. Others, as I say, like it.