Stand-up

  • 10.45-10.55 AM = Booking experience stream’s stand-up
  • 11.00-11.10 AM = Booking flexibility stream’s stand-up
  • Everyone including the PM talks about what they did the previous day, the plan for the current day, as well as blockers in their work
  • Only in exceptional cases, the stand-up extends to talk about the blockers. And only the relevant people stay back
  • If there is a longer meeting needed to close the blocker/open item, then a separate meeting is scheduled in the day

IPM

I run weekly Iteration Planning Meetings (IPMs) for the sub-streams I run inside the Transport team of Gojek. There are multiple ways to run an IPM. Here is how I do it

  • Tuesday 11.30 AM - 12.30 PM = Booking experience stream’s IPM
  • Wednesday 11.30 AM - 12.30 PM = Booking flexibility stream’s IPM
  • Since I can’t show you my own sheets, please go through the sheets in the fake Twitter PM sheet
  • First 15 mins of the IPM, we do a retrospective
  • We close the sprint, check the velocity and add it to the Retro doc
  • In the next 10 mins, we go through the projects prioritization & allocation sheet. I like to make sure the priorities of each team member is clear. Note that this sheet only contains projects under development. It is a subset of the projects mentioned in the product development checklist sheet
  • The next 5 mins involve quickly updating the team on the status of the projects in the pipeline, and not under dev; go through the product development checklist
  • I request the TL/EM to update the team work view sheet
  • I open the floor for team members to discuss blockers if any
  • Most of the times we are done within 40-45 mins. In that case, I end the meeting early. I hate doing meetings for the sake of it, and instead of expanding the meeting to fit the time slot, I prefer people going back to their work
  • Note that we don’t discuss Jira during the IPM. For me as a PM, I generally just care about whether we are meeting timelines for each milestone of the project. I don’t like obsessing over each story of a sprint. I let the developers cut their own stories with their TL. Over planning a sprint as well as micromanaging on a daily level has never given me any joy
  • I update all the trackers that I maintain async. Read my rules for Project management

Sprints

  • One week sprints
  • Backlog grooming meeting 1 day before IPM
  • Dev stories created by devs
  • Estimation of stories done jointly by dev and TL
  • Stories added to backlog
  • Jira board divided into
    • Up next
    • Blocked
    • In progress
    • Code review/Pending deployment
    • Pending in QA
    • Done/ In Production
  • Blocked = Any card which is blocked due to dependency on external teams, or some other reason
  • Done = Shipped to Production
  • Moving something to Integration != Done
  • Epics map to Dev milestones
  • Sprints are independent or milestones, which in turn are independent of client releases
  • Milestones for a feature might stretch across multiple sprints
  • Completed features get shipped in the next release