Hey You Orders a New Way of Working
Scenario
Hey You is Australia's #1 Order Ahead app with 900,000+ users and over 29 million orders. Having secured funding and continuing to grow, Hey You wanted to accelerate innovation and product delivery but the informal approach that had worked in a small start up was now constraining them.
Key problems
As the Hey You team grew, the very nimble and informal processes that worked well for a small start up were now leading to premature releases, no further improvements of features, lower productivity and frustration at the quality of the work. There was a lack of visibility and ownership across the company and disconnection between the vision and strategy and the day-to-day activities and execution.
Hey You needed to make sure the entire team of about 30 people - from development to design, marketing, sales and leadership - was motivated, had visibility of the plan, understood how it connected to the strategy and were all delivering the right thing together. They needed the right end-to-end processes cutting across the entire company and connecting the various teams so they could keep being responsive to market and improve and grow their product.
What we did
Pragmateam ran a few surveys and facilitated workshops with the leadership and product teams in order to understand the current constraints and identify opportunities for improvement. By involving most of the team to openly talk about the issues and possible causes, we started to gather bottom-up support for the changes to come.
From this initial assessment phase, we ran a company-wide planning meeting for the next increment, focusing on a very real business opportunity with a very hard date: launch Hey You gift vouchers for Christmas. With lots of collaboration between the founders with the vision and the teams with ideas on how to make it happen, plus a very good dose of prioritising what was core to this product and what could come later (or might not be important at all), the whole team came up with a plan they believed was feasible.
We then introduced a very lightweight end-to-end delivery framework going from Sales & Marketing to Product Teams and to the End User and a highly visible card wall linking the entire flow of the work together. We started coaching the teams on how to use it all: daily stand ups, leads stand up, flow, bottlenecks, constraints, work in progress, blockers, prioritisation, confidence levels, plans adjustments, escalations and so on.
With the company-wide planning reflected in a highly visible end-to-end card wall, team ownership happened naturally and the cadence of checking, sprinting, planning, delivering brought predictability, better flow and constant progress, which became part of how Hey You does successful product delivery.
“I enlisted the help of an agile coaching group called Pragmateam and learned that an agile team needs rigorous structure to be effective. We involved the whole company and, in three months, established a process that enabled us to make good decisions and build quality product and campaigns at speed.”
Outcomes for the client
With the company-wide planning reflected in a highly visible end-to-end card wall, team ownership was able to increase and the cadence of checking, sprinting, planning, delivering brought predictability, better flow and constant progress.
The new process has enabled Hey You to make good decisions and build quality products and campaigns at speed which has been instrumental in supporting their growth.
Hey You now operates as one entire team rather than a collection of teams.
Read more: in the words of the founder
Rebekah Campbell, one of the co-founders of Hey You, wrote this article in the AFR which tells this story of how Pragmateam helped the business.
