Lean Coffee Topics

Devs advocating for tech opportunities in backlog ++++++
Unlocking Cross-Squad collaboration ++++++
Unlocking collaboration +++++
Where to put a feature? App/Library/IDA/etc? ++
Localizing on frontend or backend? +++++
Repo ownership +++
Awesomizing Courseware

Notes

Devs advocating for tech opportunities in backlog
- "Tech opportunities":
  - Necessary stuff (e.g., upgrades) and proactive stuff (future-proofing)
- Development Culture and Empowerment
  - Are developers advocating for these to their product teams?
    - We do have some positive examples (e.g., Journals removal)
    - Might be harder for work that is cross-team dependent.
  - Ideas:
    - Asking for some percentage work in each sprint
    - Can we just have a consistent amount of maintenance work alotted instead of needing to justify each individual work?
    - "Scheduling dental surgery versus brushing teeth every day"
- Infrastructure
  - There has been some infrastructural support to make-upgrades easier/automated.
- Communication
  - Communicating the "business risk"
  - Providing numbers and metrics would help
    - But computing those is a time sink
Unlocking Cross-Squad collaboration
- "Squad" = the team that you work with every day
- Problems
  - I don't know what's the priority of the other teams
    - not just what they did, but what's on their roadmap
  - Teams have already packed up their work for the quarter
    - little room for injections
  - How do I know what others are working on and who I should talk to about X
    - relying on Git commit history
  - Not a consistent way of tracking projects/tickets
- Ideas
  - DevOps has 4 hours every Monday for "Quality of Life" time
    - now replaced with 5% time
  - Office Hours - can queue up non-pressing items
    - DevOps has a few processes to allow for interrupts
    - But some of them are not well attended
    - 10th floor is not a great location
  - S&E has added "component areas" to Jira that we can use
  - Monthly Arch Standup - scrum of scrums
    - enhancements:
      - focus on what's coming much more than what was done
        Write down what was done
        When speaking out loud, focus on upcoming
      - communicate out to #dev channel after the meeting
    - send a reminder to all of the engineers beforehand
    - time-box each team's update
  - Explicitly communicate in 3 channels (slack/email/all-hands) before embarking on an Epic

Retro

Overall liked the structure of this meeting
Time limits were good
Timer ring should be shorter
+1 on raising hands
Not all needed people are in the room, but a good chance to brainstorm
In the past, we have gotten a chance to dive deep on an individual's problem
More than a meeting, not a lunch
I liked raising the hand as a way to vote

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