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tags: retrospective
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# Meta Retrospective - Q4FY20

The topics for this retro is different, let's focus on how we are working together as a team.

Some questions to prime your brain:
- How is it working in the same repo?
- How is the monthly project cycle going?
- Are we collaborating well in general?
- How is it going across timezones?
- Are we making good progress on features and our goals?
- etc.

We are going to use the **4Ls** retrospective paradigm. We all need to answer the following questions:

- What did you **like**?
- What was **lacking**?
- What did you **learn**?
- What do you **long** for going forward?

## <Person's Name>

**Like**

**Lacking**

**Learn**

**Long**

## Marija Najdova

**Like**
I like that we have more developers working on the same problems, which usually is bringing fresh ideas on a problems that sometimes feels like we are stack with.

**Lacking**
Better defined direction and long term goals. Seems like we are slowly moving forward, but I am not sure that we are all on the same page of what that direction is.

**Learn**
We should spend more time on defining the goals, before jumping to implementation. Sometimes it may be hard to have clear goals at the start, but I would rather spend more time on defining a small, clearly defined goals which should be easily solvable, rather then working on a big solution for a problem that we are not even sure is that important in the given moment.

**Long**
Better communication - there are still some gaps betwen the different time zones communication, but it is slowly getting better over time.

## Mak

**Like**
I like that we have been tackling more problems together, being either Prague and Redmond collaborating more on the future of compose and what that looks like or the Card crew that I'm a part in which Engineering, Design and PM are collaborating in.

**Lacking**
We're making progress but I feel like it is going slower than it could be. It might be just my perspective but I feel like at least part of it is that we spend too much time exploring different things instead of deciding more steadily on our path forward.

**Learn**
I think the most important learning for me so far has been that writing things down in an organized, consumable way is very important, specially when working remotely. Given that we're going to continue having asynchronous communication even after the pandemic is over given that we're in different timezones. It's also good to build that habit because it permeates to other aspects of our work, like writing good release notes and good documentation.

**Long**
I think that collaboration, while better, can still be improved and it's something I very much look forward to.

## David Zearing

**Like**

* Love working with great minds! Teams members kicking butt on the details and diving in to problems
* Bugbash from Prague was really helpful and brought up great issues
* react-icons has been great to use and have; we need to bring this forward and drive adoption (and normalize all the icon packages!)
* Progress on compose

**Lacking**

* No resources driving convergence of doc sites or documentation in general.
* Resources on shield make me really nervous - things aren't getting answered fast enough, bugs going up, PRs barely staying steady
* More engagement testing component updates in product!
* API symmetry for v8 and v0 - as we settle on composition, we need to come back to this
* Some details in compose stack still need some settling (typings, slotProps vs state). Having more "ideal" use cases here will help weed out more issues.

**Learn**

* Work integrating components into WAC has been super fruitful - has reinvigorated the relationship
* We need to do this with ODSP and v8 components
* We need to do this with Teams and v8 components

**Long**

* Styling unification
* Real alignment; not just working on immediate v0 and v7 needs (this is important), but together to bring current customers to converged things, and making sure those converged things work awesome.

## Miro

**Like**

Monthly projects is a great idea (but we should have fewer projects than resources to collaborate).

**Lacking**

Long term convergence roadmap (growing ordered checklist of convergence tasks) to be sure we are really converging towards a single library.

**Learn**

Trying to improve Teams' code using several proposed tools (`compose`, `useStyles`) was not as smooth as expected - some assumptions were not correct.
We should check our ideas in products as soon as possible to avoid this kind of issues.

**Long**

We have had a couple of Prague - Redmond technical syncs where we got an opportunity to discuss convergence in detail and challenge the approach taken.
Although this might seem confrontational and uncomfortable for some people I find it really useful - we should keep doing that.

## Justin

**Like**

- Making progress on compose, v8 release, starting to lean the towers.
- Really glad we're learning how to work together super happy with the desire to collaborate from everyone on the team
- Everyone on the team has been increibly supportive and open to trying new things!

**Lacking**

- Want to prove out our our new ideas in product (in progress)
- GitHub repo health (issues and PRs) needs more attention

**Learn**

- Lots of teams depend on our code, making them all happy is hard!

**Long**

- More components and utilities shared between v7 and v0!
- More written async communication
- More chit chatting in our Teams channel

## Xu
**Like**

In general I feel we are making progress on converging the components. Even though there are a lot of uncertainties/unsolved problems, we have been quite focused on moving forward based on plan, running into problems and finding ways to solve the problem.

**Lacking**

I still don't quite see a clear picture what we can deliver within V8 and what are outside of V8 scope. Converging components lead to many fundamental changes (e.g. how we do theming, how to style components, changing props). This leads me to feel our progress towards shipping v8 (not convergence) is slower than ideal.

**Learn**

In order to make things better, we need to break things. As long as we have a good alternative story for user to accomplish the same things.

**Long**

More members on the team to try style/theme/compose in user's codebase using the components they have been working on.

## Elizabeth

**Like**

- Monthly project cycle is good for picking something and staying focused on it long enough to make progress
- It's great that we're starting to work together more instead of duplicating everything (and be able to leverage each other's work/ideas and learn from each other's different background and experience)

**Lacking**

- Still trying to find the balance of spending enough time writing up a project that it provides direction, but not spending so much time on the writing/planning that it's burdensome
- I still don't have the greatest sense of what people in Prague are working on (and communication across time zones is still hard)

**Learn**

- It's hard to balance moving things forward and not breaking people too much

**Long**

- Need more people working on build/infra
- Need better processes for maintaining repo health (issues, PRs) and ensuring we're answering customer questions from other channels (teams, stack overflow)
- Progress on improving doc site
- More social connection?

## Ben

**Like**

I like the structure of the monthly projects, and breaking the large project into smaller achievable goals each month. The weekly status meetings are helpful, both for accountability and to stay up to date with what everyone else is working on. Although writing up AOLs isn't as much fun as coding, I do see the value.

**Lacking**

It does still feel like the Redmond and Prague teams are working on separate tracks, with Redmond focusing on v8 and Prague focusing on v0. We are pushing the designs closer together (e.g. with `compose`), but the convergence team seems Redmond-centric at this point.

**Learn**

It's really helpful to have clear boundaries on a project, to focus its completion. In the case of my pivot overflow project, I ended up spending a lot of time investigating and rewriting the algorithm because I didn't set as strong boundaries about when I'd stop tweaking it and move on. On the bright side, it's given me the chance to learn a lot more about the internal workings of React and HTML/CSS.

**Long**

It would be good to have more stakes in the ground about how we're going about implementing the converged components. It still seems like we're trying to decide to what extent we can add breaking changes, and deciding on details of basic designs, like slots and theming. It's definitely important to make sure we're working on the correct thing, but I think we could make progress faster if we made stronger decisions sooner than later.

## Summary

### Goals and progress:
- Clear start and Clear end is good
- Monthly cycle good
- More long term goals.
- Long term roadmap. Checkpoints along the path to end goal.
- More stakes in the ground, more clear agreement on foundation
- More clearly defined immediate goals
- We are making progress, even if slow right now
- Need: Close on V8 shipping plan

### Communication:
- Keep working on communication across time zones
- Has challenges, but also value (ex: recent bug bash)
- Writing things down is good
- Writing things down can be hard!
- How to practice and get better?
- Don't forget to dive into technical conversations
- Even if it's uncomfortable

### Areas that need more attention:
- Doc Site:
- Lack of resources on doc sites and documentation
- How do we explain concepts
- How do we converge docs site
- Actual progress on better doc site
- Shield and Community:
- Worried about Shield, GitHub Repo, Community chat
- Better process for repo health
- Build and infra

### Product truth:
- Vetting things in product and driving based on product scenarios
- Assumptions don't always hold once we integrate into products
- +1 on this
- More intentional partner engagement
- Worked with WAC. Engage and build excitment with ODSP, Teams
- Real alignment, bring customers on to converged components

### Team
- More social, more fun!!
- How can we bring together Prague and Redmond more, share what we are working on