Retrospective - HackMD

--- tags: sprint planning, tezos title: Retrospective --- ### 08.02.2022 ***Good*** - Things are looking good in the team 1 - Panel discussion - We're getting interesting projects 1 - Hiring goes ahead - We got through all the EVE Online stuff - ManU is ready - Getting more confident about the hackathon interviews - Lots of outreach - Resident artists ***Things to change*** - We need to put a dam on the demands from outside - Become aware of demands - Concern about knowledge sharing in the team 11 - Review the daily checkin format 11 - Split it up? - Think about our processes ***Discussion*** - Purpose of the standup - Everyone is present - Announcements / sharing to the whole team - There's a lot of rambling - People are shutting it out - Solution - Jantine: Reduce the 'format' - Kitti: Introverts need help to open up - John: One person from each project gives an update on the project's progress - Separate functional standups per project? - Dani: 'talking stick' meeting? - Everyone should attend the 'sprint planning' - In a way it's a global project overview now - Separate project kanbans ***Takeaways*** - Experiment with standup format - Kitti will look into ways to do it ### 25.01.2022 ***Good*** - Birthday party for Petra <3 - Planned lunch for Thursday - Things are going well - Lots of meetings and projects - We're creating more order in projects ! - Good communication and organization - Lot of positive feedback from the ecosystem - Hackathon portal looks done - Vasil in London is picking up admin on Canvas proj - Contractors taking things off our shoulders ***Things to change*** - Covid, everything was slow !!! - Project-based kanbans for smaller teams - Operations needs more attention ***Discussion*** - We have an urban sports membership - We're in a surprisingly good mood ### 11.01.2022: retro for all 2021 ***Good*** - Enthusiastic & Inspired feels - Hack the Metaverse - Fun atmosphere - Interesting projects ++ - Involved team ++ - True collaboration + - Good energy in the team - For Diane it feels like starting a new life - Learning from each other - Lots of things happened fast - Whitelabel project went really smooth - We came a long way from being four people at Factory - Managed to sell the idea of the community space to the Foundation - We're explorative and trusting to each other - We were constantly experimenting, which is good - We are finally working on things we set out to do in the beginning - New office - We launched lots of stuff and it worked well - We can make an impact - Having this retro is really nice ***Things to change*** - More promotion, more hype, more buzz for the hackathons - People leaving the UI team - We should respect the planned sprint schedule more - Idle time with no tasks followed by panic and immediate deadlines - Projects should be better defined - More sharing of information, better team cohesion - Petra doesn't understand a lot of things yet - More team get-togethers, initiatives, lunches +++ - Lack of coordination - We need people help with structure and roadmapping - We shouldn't try to do more, but rather try to do less on the long term - Hopefully we'll mature as an organization - We need to make sure we don't suffocate in process - Avoid overseer mentality - Lot of requirements from the outside -> more control over our work ***Discussion*** - It's not a plan to put someone on top of others - Hire people to connect & facilitate - Diane knows people who did something like this at Factory - They can also help with taking care of the space - Jantine wants to interview people from different backgrounds - More social events - Team social calendar - Cleaners - Lack of toilet cleaning is not nice - Strangers coming into the office is a security threat - We should hire an office manager - Structure and predictability - Should we change the process? - We need someone dedicated to help with that - We need more analysis before making decisions - We need more time to reflect - Slow down a little? - More intention about project structure - Follow-up steps - Definition of done - we might want to create insights, publish something - After-delivery meeting - Learnings - Following steps - Postmortem - Shoreh is alone on the frontend - She's already recommended an overview meeting so she can better understand needs and goals - We sometimes forget things because of the chaos - It's hard to plan time on the frontend because of last minute changes ***Followup*** - Ricardo would like a private conversation with Jantine and John - Session on how to audit a smart contract ### 03.12.2021 ***Good*** - Diane: happy to be in the office, is really productive being at the office. Two days a week is good to be in. Starting to find her place, lots of different projects. Loves to connect more with the team. More sharing of what we are doing is good. Guidelines - Tristan: happy in general, no improvements. We work together nicely. - Anita: it is a lot of fun, but the event is taking up a lot of time. It is important to build up a system of what we are doing. Good to be reflective about some people leaving. - Viktor: Art Basel was stressfull, but fun. Sad some people are leaving - Kitti: Happy, do not fully understand everything. Learning a lot, super interesting. How to schedule my time productively, need to find a right balance. - Shubhendu: not much to say, since he was on vacation. - Rick: is happy, whitelabel store is fun to work on, different than the indexer. Also nice to have the different tools coming together. - Ricardo: Like to work in the office, but family wise needs to work from home sometimes. Sad that Tim is leaving. Sprint went well, a lot of things. - Tim: generally nice working on the whitelabel stuff, Martin was a bit a blocker. Difficult to switch between projects. Nice working here. - Dani: Overall it was a good sprint. Sometimes harder period because of mental health, but the atmosphere at the office was really good. Good that EVE has been delivered, everyone could be more relaxed. - Action item: find pathways to share information and what is going on as well for when people are remote. Timothy leaving: wanted to have more iterative processes of going forward. Culture could be improved. It is nice to create more a family style, to be ### 19.11.2021 ***Good*** - Jantine feels better - Kitti has joined, Petra is joining, Diane is getting tangible results - Recruitment should be kept going - Whitelabel NFT store is coming along nicely, lot of working together - Team dynamic is good - It's good to work together physically - We have collective experience on shipping a product with Eve - Improvement on how we deal with pressure - There's more collaboration on frontend - It was good to try an deploy with time left before deadline ***Things to change*** - Operational bottleneck because of pressure on Jantine - Some pain on Eve ***Discussion*** - John has a checklist for NFT projects ### 2.11.2021 ***Good*** - Interesting tasks on the frontend - Lot of cooperation this sprint - Productive, good communication - We broke up with PyTezos, Taquito works so much better - We made good progress with good feelings - Frequent sync up meetings ***Things to change*** - Jantine feels like her agenda items are being deprioritized - Stressful on the UI side - Shoreh was excluded from the Eve meeting - She cancelled her vacation for Eve - She was pulled into the project late, and had to catch up - We should discuss design beforehand, and not after the fact - Anita would like a point of contact for each project ***Discussion*** - Wit Eve we're working on a 'real' project, that helps the team gel - Notion as a tool might help keep strategy in focus - Diane is joining us, she might help a lot ### 19 October 2021 ***Good*** - Super big subscription PR - Things were good - Taquito seems to work much better than PyTezos - London trip was nice, built relationships - We're getting through work - We started doing user testing - Eve provides a better focus on what to do - The indexer has been released ***Things to change*** - Jantine was overloaded ***Discussion*** - We need to hire more people :) - We had more communication, but could use even more - We could do more things together ### h3 ***Good*** - No delivery pressure - F1 is delivered - We finished up according to plan - Tacode is nice - Hire Phillip Klein? ***Things to change / negatives*** - Hiring is a disaster - People start too late (?) - Lot of pressure on hackathons - Jantine is overworked - Frontend work isn't managed very well - More communcation between frontend and backend - Not entirely clear what priorities are - More clarity on working from home? - Timothy feeling somewhat excluded - More communication could happen in the office - Meetings start irregularly ***Discussion*** - If not working from home, be there at the standup? - Anita dislikes pressure - We shouldn't have rules that we don't need - Mornings are weird, communication is hard - On the frontend there's barely anything to do - The hackathon frontend is stuck - Timothy feels that he should only work on the PM - There should be someone responsible for each project? - Ownership vs isolation? - Tasks shouldn't be withheld from the backlog - Backlog grooming with Jantine/Shubhendu - We need less paranoia about being 'busy' ***Takeaways*** - Let's try to be in the office more - What is known as needed should be in the backlog - Regular backlog grooming meetings - Have wave-dragging people - responsibility / ownership for a project ### Retro 21-09-2021 ***Good*** - Low key and predictable sprint - Clear priority on hackathons - Recruitment going well on design side - Tezzards retrospective valuable - Team spirit ***Things to change*** - Priorities changed too much during the sprint (UI) - Rick feeling isolated w\ indexer - Feels like two separate teams, little comms - Not enough developers to hire / Recruitment not going well on dev - Too much work on John ***Takeaways*** - Focus on freelancers for blockchain dev - Easier to find - Increases Tezos skills in the wild - Things will improve if we start doing events - More knowledge sharing - Informal open communication - Communal lunch in the office more often - Thursday every two weeks? ***Checkout*** - Nice that it didn't take the full hour (don't need to artificially talk about things) - Britta should be in the retro ### Retro 07-09-2021 ***Good*** - More structure in the Frontend team (timothy) - Internet set up (John, Shubhendu, Viktor) - F1 demo (John) - Design before development happened (Anita) - Dani´s presentation (everyone) - Happy with the team and react native (Shohreh) ***Bad*** - Reducing Front-end team (timothy) - Mathematics can be a struggle (timothy) - NFTs had been send out wrongly (John) - Upcoming projects (Anita) ***Start*** - Reduce external dependencies as much as possible (Dani) - Buy a microwave (shohreh) - Project briefs for projects to be filled in (Anita, Shohreh) ### Retro 26-08-2021 ***Good*** - Prediction market is released (anita, Cynthia, Dani, Timothy) - Project brief progress (anita) - Cross team collaboration (Anita, Shohreh, Dani) - Talks with Anita regarding UX cleared up a lot (Dani) ***Bad*** - Internet down - No designer and other job out there(Shubhendu) - Next steps prediction market is unclear (Anita) - No microwave (Cynthia) - Construction and painting (Cynthia) - Better documentation / explanation about concepts, for example of the concept of liquidity. For onboarding purposes when they work on new projects - No correct design leads to confusion and there was no tinme to pick things up (Shohreh) - Security audit deadline was too ad hoc and soon (Dani) - Didn´t know that a hackathon portal was being build (Dani) - Productive sprints (Timothy) ***Start*** - Start making the syncs and presentation optional, and schedule them during lunch. Appoint a person to own this (Anita). - More presentations (Tim) - Communication about dependencies in communal chat (Tim) ### Retro 10-08-2021 ***Good*** - Project management and retro has improved (Timothy, John) - Rick is here (John) - Gitcoin presentation went well (John) - More clarity on the prediction market scope (Anita) - Cross team collaboration (Anita) - Design development cycle quicker turn around (Anita) - Positive team atmosphere (Rick, Jantine) - Flexibility - tv tower event (john, jantine) - despace! (anita, jantine, tim) ***Bad*** - Front end tasks change on a weekly basis (Timothy) - Estimation is thrown away and we cannot stick to it (Timothy, Shubhendu, Cynthia) - Issue of monarchy is still there (John) - Prediction market still dragging on (John) ***Start*** - Office Clean up (Anita) ***Stop*** ***Start*** - Buy shades for the windows on the sunny side - Start estimation plan - What will be the new projects after the PM - Buy a microwave ***Discussion*** - Future projects / Roadmap - Estimation / Prioritisation - Wednesday FE estimation ***Action*** - Projects Briefs (Anita, Jantine, Tim) - Deadline this sprint - Proposals for projects online setup (Tim) - Prep for workshop day mid september (Tim, Jantine, Anita, Diane) - Wednesday FE estimation planning (shubhendu) ### Retro 27-07-2021 ***Good*** - New office (Timothy, Viktor, Shohreh, Dani, jantine) - Velocity is better this sprint (Timothy, John, Cynthia) - Team spirit (Viktor) - Good collaboration of hackathon website and design (Shohreh) - Supportive atmosphere (Dani) - More clarity on goals (Dani) - Front end organisation initiative (Cynthia) - Special shout out to Timothy for taking initiatives (Timothy) - everyone has a key(jantine) - finally a fridge(jantine) ***Bad*** - Office noisy (Timothy, Shubhendu) - Velocity can be better (John) - Drilling - Mirrors in the bathroom (Cynthia, jantine) - Missing dongle (Anita) - Emotional reaction should get an appropriate analysis before being a complaint (Anita) - Stop rumbaing during meetings (Shubhendu) - missing private/meeting rooms(jantine) - more furniture(jantine) ***Stop*** ***Start*** - More team events, like drinks or lunch (timothy) - Shared office tasks / schedule (Dani, Timothy) - Buy a microwave (Shohreh, Cynthia) - Lunch together (Shubhendu) - More operational/ supportive processes-cleaning,lunch, etc (jantine) Start lunch telegram Discussion points **Velocity and the process of improvement** - Think in a kizen way, shared responsibility, build up natural processes - Presenting the end goal is not the way forward - Confusion of priorities - Confusing of authority, is it Arthur? - Definition of Done, would be good to have. - Deadline of prediction market should be asked - Every project should get a project brief (one pager) ### Retro 13-07-2021 ***Good*** - Presentation was nice (Timothy, Shohreh) - Great atmosphere (Dani, Viktor, Cynthia) - New office (Viktor, Cynthia, Anita) - Design review structure (Cynthia) - We seem to be the best performing team (John) - Punctuality (John) - presentation (jantine) - people are clean- not too much trash (jantine) - more autonomy ***Bad*** - Asana badly organised (timothy) - Too big and many design reviews (Timothy, Anita, Shohreh) - Prioritisation unclear (Dani) - More jobs started than finished (John) - We are not working fast enough (John) - Worrying less with the Asana board (John) - limited number of keys (jantine) ***Start*** - Prioritising tasks in asana (timothy) - More team discussions(timothy) - More team activities, started to do less since we moved out of Factory (Dani, Viktor) - More frequent presentations (Viktor) - More knowledge sharing of the projects everyone is working on (Anita) - Hiring a new designer (Anita) - Define MVP scope from the beginning of a project (Anita) - Hire a Project or Product Manager? (Anita) - Design review should be one sprint in advance (Shohreh) - Being more pragmatic, good enough is good enough (John) - record or save presentations (jantine) - more furniture (jantine) Discussion points - Velocity - Timothy - Personally my velocity was slower, prioritising will help velocity - Shubhendu - in the front end we can increase velocity by optimising the design review. We create tasks, but we do not describe well how long tasks take. Splitting tasks that are too big, in order to be more effective. - John - Concentrate more on delivering, but not focusing upon the highest quality - Jantine - Working with deadlines - Anita - Making deadlines inherent to the sprint - Dani - Traditional sprint reviews should be Unclear Priorities - Shubhendu - If we add more deadlines to a task it will help - Dani - Clear priorities from above are a bit missing - Jantine - Roadmap made by Jantine and John - John: Eve, Mclaren and RedBull will be the most pressing priorities very likely Next sprint: let's talk more about priorities in next sprint meeting as a discussion topic. ### Retro 29-06-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Viktor, Jantine, Tim, Dani ***Good*** - Arthur is using us when he wants something to get done (John) - New office will hopefully get us more productive and make it easier to work together (Dani) - Team atmosphere is very good (Jantine, Viktor) - Moving to the new office (Jantine, Viktor, Shohreh, Tim, Anita, Dani) - We left the factory on good terms (Jantine) - Pull request for design review (Shohreh) - improvement in hackathon (Shohreh) - Making a lot of progression (Anita) ***Bad*** - Arthur is using us when he wants something to get done (John) - Finding new employes is hard work at the moment (John) - Too much to do in too little time (Jantine) - Having design happen at the same time as developing (Anita) - No espresso machine (Dani) ***Start*** - Britta starts working with us next week (Jantine) - Growing the non tech team (Jantine) - Bi-weekly syncing (Shubhendu, Shohreh) - Team presentation, maybe on thursday afternoons (Shubhendu, Shohreh) - Move to the new office (Shubhendu) - Having clear deadlines for scope and design (Anita) - Talk through the design with other member of the team (Anita) ***Stop*** - Doing the retro with stickynotes on a wall, since it is not really social (Dani) - Being late to meetings (John) ***Action items*** - Weekly sync: Shubhendu will schedule this - Frontend blockers with UI (We don't have a solution to this one yet) - Make sure that we have a checklist for the sprint planing tha also inlcudes deadlines ### Retro 03-06-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Viktor, Cynthia, Jantine, Tim, Dani **Good** - lower pressure sprint after PM (John) - the usual- good team, leaving factory soon (Cynthia) - weather (Cynthia) - Good that we got the PM acceptable (Shohreh) - Good to do 1v1s and get personal feedback (Shohreh) - good team (Viktor, Tim) - released something (Dani) - good atmosphere (Dani, Tim) - Fe meetings/ doing more design review (Anita) - **Bad** - Still some PM stuff hanging around (John) - communication issues with people working remotely (Cynthia, Tim) - testing not finished (Viktor) - factory(Viktor) - Office too cramped, hard to do meetings (Dani) - Design review can be tedious (anita) - development getting ahead of designs (Anita) **Stop** - Bad chairs **Start** - Getting in the new office (John, Cynthia, Shohreh) - more spontaneous/group meetings on topics- UI/Backend/etc (Dani, tim) - Scope/content/design deadlines planned if there's a dev deadline so that everything can be complete for dev handover (Anita) - more structure for retros/recurrent meetings ( Tim) - using good practices for coding/Prs/etc (Tim) - current topics presentations encouraging people to learn about new topics(Shubhendu) - collecting topics in a space for new hires and our reference (Tim) - List of topics for presentations hackMd/Share drive (Anita) - SHAME 🔔 --- ### Retro 03-06-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Viktor, Cynthia, Jantine, Tim **Good** - Turned in prediction Market (John, Viktor, Shubhendu, Shohreh) - Dog/ new employee Tim (Viktor) - Good collaboration on deadline (Cynthia, Shohreh) - Positive mood (Jantine) - People like the team in the building (Jantine) - great joining the team (Tim) - two releases! after a year(Anita) - Shubhendu is so organized (Anita) **Bad** - living in the Factory (Viktor) - clearing issues with foundation (Jantine) - Hectic week to prepare for presentation (Shubhendu) - chair issues (Shorhreh) - documentation issues (Tim) - no design review before development (Anita) **Start** - start dogfooding(?) do more in-house testing (John) - start knowledge sharing (Jantine, Shubhendu, Shohreh) - Hiring more non-tech people(Jantine) - start confirming designs before development (Anita) - staging platform/ merging designs with PRs (Anita) **Stop** - being bottleneck for issues (Jantine) ### Retro 18-05-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Dani, Viktor, Cynthia, Jantine **Good** - Almost found an office (John, Jantine) - Making progress on projects (John, Jantine, Dani, Cynthia, Anita) - Website - Prediction market - Heavier priotization on one task to push it to completion (Anita) - Go-ahead from Arthur to grow the team (Jantine) - Berlin recognized as strategic - Tim will start from June (Shubhendu) - Team spirit, collaborative (Viktor) - New frontend group on GitHub (Shohreh) **Bad** - Stressful two weeks, stress has leaked into vibe (John, Jantine, Dani) - Office (Viktor) - Foundation etc - Demotivating - Sprint planning should be more formalized (Shubhendu, Dani) - Commitments to complete should be stronger - Commitments should communicated to Arthur (make tradeoffs clear) - Sprint planning should be brief, worried about meeting inflation (Dani) - Operational organization (e.g. Tim start date confusion) (Jantine) **Start** - Increase recruitment, esp for non-tech roles (Jantine) - Sprint reviews (Shubhendu) - More (+ faster) communication, sometimes more direction (Dani, Viktor, Shohreh) - Tighter connection to Thierry - Overlapping and similar projects should be flagged - New office might help with this - Dani can step up to help with communication/cohesion for backend stuff - Create frontend team on GitHub - Would be good to know about different projects (Shohreh) - Basic overview for easy switching - Logic behind designs - Using Zeplin as source of truth for design/dev handover (Anita) **Stop** - Bringing bad foundation vibes to team (beyond what's required to keep everyone in the loop) (Jantine) - Delayed starts to meetings (Shubhendu) - Smoking (Viktor, Shohreh) **Action items** - @shekhar-shubhendu schedule sprint reviews ### Retro 04-05-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Dani, Viktor, Cynthia, Jantine **Good** - More velocity lately (John) - Made progress on new UI (Shubhendu) - Team (Jantine, Dani, Viktor, Shohreh) **Bad** - Office - Factory (John, Jantine, Viktor) - Not much clarity about where we'll be each day — will be good to have our own office (Cynthia) - No clarity with foundation (Jantine) - Late starts to meetings (John) - Increase in tension (Dani) **Start** - Making action items for retro (Jantine) - Include all projects in sprint planning (Jantine) - Start sprint review (Jantine, Shubhendu) - Improve onboarding - People who are new to blockchain (Dani) - Good onboarding documents in repository (Shubhendu) - Project overviews - Code standards - Contribution guidelines **Stop** None **Action Items** - @Jantinin will add everyone to HackMD - @everyone: add items to [Internal Onboarding Tz Connect](https://hackmd.io/6fttMgr8TTOv0VWhpF2MEQ) - @shekhar-shubhendu will start making good repository onboarding process docs - @shekhar-shubhendu @jsnewby will clean up TZ Connect GitHub - @Jantinin @dani plan blockchain 101 series ### Retro 20-04-2021 Present: Anita, Shohreh, John, Shubhendu, Dani, Viktor, Cynthia, Jantine **Anita** Good - conversational style, consensus Bad - not always knowing what to prioritise - couldn’t contribute to the feedback to the EVE demo since it was communicated on the day itself - Big picture definition: not sure where to draw the line with planning, many open questions Start - Locking design tasks in the beginning of the sprint - Cross projects prioritorisation - Internal onboarding wiki, especially on blockchain, as well Tezos specific **Shubhendu** Good - Prediction market is getting ready - We started writing proper front-end code Bad - No project deadlines - People do not add carts to the board beforehand - No clarity on scope on prediction market Start: - More clarification on what is required and planning Dani Good - Pretty effective, good atmosphere Bad - Factory small office and issues with the Factory Start - Sharing and communicating more on the different things we are working on **Shohreh** Good - Team is amazing - Happy that sprint planning is bringing more clarity Bad - No project deadlines Start - Internal onboarding wiki / Onboarding in blockchain - Design one sprint ahead ready Start - Hackmd with internal onboarding guide - Written overview of what is the prediction market about and what it will be (Cecille) How much to document and how to update, Cecille Readme **Viktor** Good - New office - Team atmosphere Bad - Covid - Office situation **John** Good - Things are going well Bad - Lot of learning on the job - There are always new requirements for the prediction market, ever-growing project  Start - Onboarding wiki - Blockchain 101 - Trying to aim for deadlines, difficult however if **Cynthia** Good - New, everything seems nice - Bad - Start - Internal onboarding hackmd