I have a new coaching assignment at Tradera which is the Swedish branch of Ebay. I’ve been there about 30 hours during the last three years, mostly doing presentations and courses. In a way it feels like I’ve been part in what they have done, but only as a bystander. This gig looks like a lot of fun and I’ve always been impressed by the technical excellence there and the willingness to adopt new things and change.
I was thrown right in at the deep end as they were about to reorganize their big team (30-40 people) into 5 smaller teams with particular features to look after. The first thing they wanted help with was some input around HOW to go about organizing this. And make no mistake - they we’re well on their way doing this in a excellent way already. I merely supplied some confirmation and ideas. The good thing about working with great clients (:))
The challenge
So our challenge was to do this re-organization without people feel that we decided for them. We wanted everyone to work where they wanted - no were they had to, according to “our” opinion. Each team had (what is normally called) a ProductOwner and maybe one or two Business Analysts assigned already. The people we wanted to distribute was mainly technical people such as developer and testers.
The idea
What we ended up with was simple idea that turned out to be a fun and interesting event: we organized a team marketplace. I’m probably influenced from somewhere and credits are probably due. Please correct me if you’ve heard about this and I should point somewhere there.
Basically we had every Product Owner (PO) for each team to create a presentation for their team, the team mission and where they wanted to go with the team. I suggested that each team was to supply a metric or two that will be important for them. The presentations each team lead gave was very impressive as they all presented impact maps (or something like that), vital metrics and visions in a great way. That gave us all a good way to know what was going to happen in the team.
We then had one day where we introduced the company vision, WHY this was way of working was important NOW. Each team then got 30 minutes to present themselves in away that would attract the “right” people to their team.
The first day was ended with an open discussion held as a Lean Coffee and we went for a beer (or other cold beverage, Salvation Army friends) or two.

