Retrospective after one year at Creditas

Last Friday was the last day at Creditas.

Retrospectives are one of the best ways that I know today for Continuous Improvement. So, here it comes a retrospective of this year at Creditas and what I learned.

Went well 😊

• Met and worked with amazing people 🙌

• Learned Brasilian Portuguese 🇧🇷

• Learned about Kanban Maturity Model

• Able to perform various Workshops and internal training on:

  • Domain-Driven Design

  • Event Storming

  • 4 Key Metrics of Accelerate

  • Distributed Systems Fundamentals

• Gained more experience in Engineering Strategy

Designing an Engineering Strategy. Part I

• Gained more experience in running Remote Distributed Teams

On running a Global Team with 5 hours time difference

• Pull Systems instead of Push Systems to drive change

Pull Systems instead of Push to drive team change

• Improved my visual collaboration and communication skills

• Gained experience in big company organization methods

  • Quarter Planning

  • Program Management Collaboration

  • Job Design Definition

• Moved from a Feature Team to a Product Team mindset

  • Aligned expectations with high-level leadership and business

  • Helped the team to gain the necessary skills and ceremonies to do so

  • Facilitated several Lean Inceptions to build a Product Vision and a Quater Roadmap

• Tribe Level Domain Discoveries and Team Allocations with

  • Event Stormings

  • Bounded Contexts

  • Context Mappings

• Prioritization beats efficiency

  • Able to switch from a delayed product to delight our customers impacting their journey by dropping heavily the scope and narrowing the efforts towards the big pains and gains.

  • When the situation is dramatic, make big educated decisions.

    • Applied Cynefin Framework

  • Learned to drop a lot of stuff, and I mean I dropped a lot of stuff. Being unable to attend to everything and able to work with ambiguity and uncertainty has been a huge challenge.

• People make the decision to step into a leadership career when they are exposed to meaningful leadership 🧡

  • I had the opportunity to learn how showing the path helped people to want to start their leadership career in an organization that it’s hard due to the need for synchronicity (a lot of meetings)

• Great people in the People department make the difference 👏

  • Thank you Laura to show me the impact of a Business Partner 🧡

• Good experimentation and learning culture drive everything else.

  • Give the team the space to experiment and try stuff

  • When the team looks for guidance, providing a safety net for experimentation and challenging them worked better.

Not so well 😰

• Legacy Sociotechnical Systems influenced more of my decisions than I was aware of.

Honor the Past and Commit to the Legacy

• If a company is relying on synchronous communication and collaboration, moving to more asynchronous won’t happen without proper effort.

  • Synchronous collaboration lets into less efficiency due to all teams relying more and more on sync to get the job done

  • This is also reflected in the architectural patterns used.

    • Overuse of Partnership and Mutually Dependent or Downstream/Upstream collaboration patterns of Context Mapping

• When tough situations happen, people go back to the old ways of working as a safe zone.

  • If we look at Kanban Maturity Model, it’s like moving to one less level of maturity, but it usually doesn’t go back to 2 levels.

• Hiring is hard.

• Hiring leaders is harder

• Firing is also hard.

• Rebuilding team trust after a firing happened is harder

• Leadership rotation can let to dysfunction when not properly managed

  • Then, a huge effort is being done to correct that dysfunction.

• Given enough Big Lead Time, you start becoming Waterfall aiming to decrease the uncertainty and be more predictable.

  • This doesn’t work.

• When the Debt is too much, a radical effort needs to be done to decrease it to stay competitive. This radical effort is still more than I expected in the first place.

  • Manageable Debt can be considered strategically important to protect yourself from competitors. Where competitors can be:

    • Other companies

    • Cybersecurity threats

  • Manageable Debt can be seen from several perspectives. You might have a manageable debt to deliver features but not for adapting architecture fast. Having a good Lead Time in delivering features doesn’t mean you finished removing strategic technical debt.

• A team that’s gaining confidence on how to work together, needs time for those habits to become working pillars. Give the proper space for the team until they settle the practices and methodologies.

New ideas 🤔

• Understand Money Flow earlier 💸

• Dedicate more effort to Expectations Alignment and Employee Experience.

  • It’s worth every minute 🧡

• Leadership Training to set the Fundamentals of Ways of Working

• In order to improve async communication and collaboration, today I would:

  • Make it part of the Job Expectations

  • Make a top-down commitment to how we want to improve our async

  • Provide training on async

Meme for you