Scaling Up – A Case Study in Coaching for Growth
When scaling, an organisation goes through multiple challenges.
Despite planning for growth, there can be:
Disruption in processes.
Undefined roles of leadership.
Hiccups in communication.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Anco van der Wurff, Organisational Transformation Coach and Executive Advisor, was faced with similar challenges when dealing with a client transformation.
In this particular instance, the client was a Crypto Exchange scale up, going through hyper-growth, from 70 to circa 300 people – all within a single year in multiple locations across Europe. Goals and ways of working were constantly changing on the fly.
Anco’s mission? To help the company scale up and become a more structured organisation to fuel further growth.
With the growth the company was going through, they were doubling the capacity of development. Many team members, such as ex-developers, moved up the ranks to fill in roles of team leads. Lithe’s role quickly became about focusing on culture and supporting these teams and new leads in their new environment.
When working with a company, Lithe coaches often do a lot of mentoring, much like what Anco applied in this case. Alongside the mentorship, there is a review process and being part of the team. Some questions that Lithe posed were:
Is the team doing what it needs to be doing?
Are the processes right?
Are the right tools in place?
Are the right meetings in place? How are those meetings facilitated?
What does efficient communication look like?
How does a team work and contribute together?
This process of understanding revolves primarily around teams and how they operate, not just through processes but also in their maturity and understanding of their roles.
Anco amongst his Agile and Scrum training techniques, also used Co-Active Coaching to support the teams. An approach that works miracles when coaching individuals, the Co-Active coaching model accompanies people in their growth so that they are able to confront their problems. It encourages listening, curiosity, intuition, self-management and deepening learning.
The impact?
Creating a culture where everyone is empowered; where teams are free to extract perspective and fuel from their work and collaborate and grow as one big community.
Working with the product owners and the CPO, the initial aims were to get the basics right: this included using JIRA to organise work and ensure processes are in place. There was a drive around being consistent as well: everyone using the same ticket types, backlogs were being prioritised in the same manner and there was coherency within teams and across departments.
The Playbook
With multiple teams working on different features, there needed to be synergy. Team leads were under pressure and stress to deliver constantly but without having the tools and resources to work with other teams. The vision of the work was siloed and didn’t cater to the bigger picture of what scaling meant for the organisation.
The work was broken down into four phases:
Preparing the work
Planning the work
Doing the work
Reviewing the work
The teams at the time were working in lots of different ways and there were varying sets of processes. Anco introduced the Playbook, where once a process needed to be designed for a piece of work, it would get documented. This document became the source for everything relating to processes and communication and also served as a source of information for newcomers to have a one-stop shop for processes.
In the first layer, in an organisation where there are small distributed teams, there will be more autonomous teams as they will have clearer boundaries. These teams work independently and are likely to create software architecture
In the second layer, if there are large, collated teams and are dependent on each other, they are more likely to create a monolithic architecture.
Based on this, Conway’s Law shows that the structure of an organisation’s design, or the architecture of a system, will reflect the number of communications a team has whilst they are producing the systems. The more the communication needed, the more complex the architecture. The more complex the architecture, the less chances of being able to scale. It can become chaotic and complex.
In order for an organisation to be lean, the communication needs to be lean as well.
Resistance to change
Often, when there is growth at this scale, there is a certain amount of resistance to change. Individuals and team leads are set in their ways and sometimes can lack the maturity to look at the bigger picture and strive for change. However, in this instance, the organisation was quite open to change. They were willing to listen and adapt to the changes proposed and were quite passionate about where the direction of the business was heading.
Where there was occasional resistance, open conversations were had and a consensus was reached before proceeding. The key was to make this process work long-term for the organisation, and everyone’s buy-in was necessary.
How Lithe supported the client in their growth transformation:
OKRs were implemented throughout the organisation; alongside this KPIs were also set for both the Development Team level and Product Team level. In the development teams, KPIs were used to improve predictability, bring problems to the surface and continuously improve the working of the team.
On the product level, KPIs were used to state hypotheses when it came to assessing the value brought with each feature; they were also used to assess the impact that the new features would have on the end customer rather than pushing out features ´because stakeholders want something´.
There was also a focus on improving dependencies between teams, making sure they were aligned on a product and technological level. Anco encouraged different teams to join meetings of other teams to be better aligned and improve cross-team developments, where multiple teams were working together to introduce and deliver new features. Anco worked with the teams to clarify the roadmap, create efficiencies and give product owners visible tools to help them communicate with stakeholders. This was key in empowering them to have better conversations to help them manage their departments and prioritise the backlog.
Anco van der Wurff
Organisational Transformation Coach and Executive Advisor