At the end of my studies at Hyper Island, I completed an industrial placement at Djungo, an early stage social discovery startup. Djungo is a community-driven, social discovery platform that encourages Generation Z to get together in real life. My main activities are detailed in two other case studies (see B2C Monetisation and Product Vision), but in this time I also spotted an opportunity to support the team in becoming more collaborative and effective.
I was responsible for end-to-end preparation and execution of the workshops and activities I describe below.
While I was at Djungo, the team had completely changed at a critical point while leading up to the MVP launch. It was therefore necessary for us to spend some time on agreeing our areas of responsibility and how we work together without taking up too much of our limited time. I saw an opportunity for me to hone my facilitation skills, so I offered to take on the role of scrum master alongside my other responsibilities. My aim was to help the team work better together and become more effective.
Reviewing the existing team ceremonies, I found that apart from a daily standup, the team did not spend much time on planning together or reviewing their efficiency as a group. Additionally, the meetings that did exist were lengthy, lacked structure and clear outcomes. Since there was no joined-up plan, a lot of ad hoc meetings were required to align between different team members (e.g. design and tech, CEO and marketing, CEO and product, etc.)
Based on the pain points I had identified, I saw the potential benefit of adding in short, structured agile ceremonies to help us stay aligned and move faster. I also proposed planning sessions together as a group could remove the need for the unplanned alignment sessions, hopefully with the end result of reducing time spent in meetings for everyone.
Initially the feedback from the team was mixed; they saw the benefit of more structured meetings, but it felt that I was adding meetings to the calendar, rather than removing meeting time. However, after a few weeks, they could see the benefits of removing the ad hoc alignment sessions, and could feel that more time had been freed up in their diaries to focus on adding value.
I realised I love facilitating workshops and agile ceremonies while at Djungo, and was very pleased by the opportunity afforded to hone this skill during my time. There are some things that I want to work on further, such as how to best facilitate in a hybrid set-up, where some participants are together in a room and others are dialling in remotely.
My main learnings was to always create actionable items in the meeting based on the discussion, and assigned owners and deadlines. This helped especially with integrating feedback on our ways of working.
