Hugo Vinet

· productivity, management, motivation

Absence of scrum @ big tech

deep dive article on the topic: (How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum)[https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/]

Example: Skype (all in on scrum) vs Whatsapp (purposely ignore all heavy process) -> Whatsapp out-executed Skype and won the market.

  • In the survey, 83% of engineers would advise against JIRA
  • None of the big tech companies listed enforce a methodology like scrum or kanban

Plan -> Build (Iterate) -> Ship

@ Amazon, Apple, Datadog, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Shopify, Uber...

Amazon has 6-pagers for the "plan" phase.

Most go through an RFC-like phase before iterating.

Some use a Kanban-like process to work on the top priority.

Shopify calls it "GSD" (Get Sh*t Done) in 6 week cycles.

The cycle is often around 6-8 weeks, enough to ship something meaningful, but not too long to be able to see the end. Sometimes with a 2 week "cool down" period to work on other things.

They all focus on:

  • Product focused environments
  • Empowered and autonomous teams
  • A motivated engineer easily makes multiple times the impact of a "factory worker"
  • Exposure to business & metrics

The product manager is not in charge of project management. They don't write tickets/tasks. They focus on vision, strategy & partnership. Engineers carry most of the project management responsibility & create their own tasks.

Competent, autonomous people need less structure to produce reliable, high-quality output. Big Tech is able to attract, afford and hire these people.

Scrum/Jira is optimized for reporting => low trust environment

6-pager (Amazon)

  • Structured as a narrative essay (no slides or bullet points)
  • Clear purpose, background, problem/opportunity, solution, alternatives, risks, FAQs
  • Meeting format: 20-30min of silent reading, then starts the discussion

RFCs (Uber)

  • little plan before building
  • capture the plan in a short document
  • have a few selected people review
  • send to all engineers. Let everyone comment
  • have everyone follow these steps for anything non-trivial, keep this a lightweight process