In the previous post we introduced what a customer result is. In this post we want to show you how The meshcloud way of work forms cross-functional teams that own the customer results they work on.
Most customer results are scoped to a timeframe between 4 and 12 weeks worth of team work. This means that during this time the customer result team forms, establishes a firm grip on the problem space, delivers a result and validates the desired outcome was achieved.
Forming Customer Result Teams
Our Customer Results board is the central operational planning mechanism for the company. We believe that teams work best when everyone is committed to the same goal. We therefore empower meshis to choose customer results they work on on their own.
How does that work in practice? As a meshi specializing in a specific function (e.g. you’re a Marketing Manager or Software Engineer) you look through the next highest prioritized customer results. Do you see yourself in the dream team and think you can make an outstanding contribution to this result? Great, you assign yourself to the team.
Kicking it off
As soon as the team is fully assembled, you meet with the team to kick off your mission. In this first meeting you disseminate the customer result together and explore the problem space. Together with your team you form an understanding of the challenge ahead and start making a plan on how you will tackle it. This may involve building a backlog of user stories, arranging customer interviews or any other activity and method that you find suitable to achieve the goal. While there’s an established set of best practices and tooling available, we trust teams to know best what works form them.
Every customer result has an assigned supporter who’s role is to support and mentor the team in these activities. Supporters are experienced senior meshis whose job is to make sure the team stays on the path to success. The first thing the supporter will guide the team towards is how to make a solid plan and condense it to a form where you can present it at our weekly company all-hands.
Flock and Customer Result Work
As a meshi working in a customer result team, you work on the mission and act like a "liaison officer" to your flock (what this is will be covered in the next blog post). Let’s illustrate this with an example. Suppose you’re a software engineer working in a customer result and your team has determined that the best way to achieve the desired outcome is to add a new product feature. The product implementation and its development process are owned by your flock, you follow them when working on the feature implementation. Acting as the team’s liaison officer to the product, you coordinate any necessary product architecture and implementation decisions with your flock and help the customer result team understand how the feature can be rolled out to production.
Syncing with your Customer Result Team
We believe that meshis are best positioned to manage the operational work they are doing. That’s why meshis are responsible for managing their own time to work on customer results and working on flock duties. Customer result teams therefore arrange their own work schedule when they will be working together on the project and how they will meet and coordinate the ongoing work. In practice, most teams use a weekly sync meeting and have virtual collaboration spaces (e.g. in our gather.town office, ClickUp lists, channel on slack etc.)
Wrapping it Up
As your customer result nears completion, the team and its supporter focus on evaluating the outcome by collecting customer feedback and metrics. It’s important to plan this phase well ahead of time, as collecting feedback from the real world takes time and patience. Nonetheless, it’s really important to conduct this rigorously to put the customer result to a definitive end. Definitive end means that you share at an all-hands which outcomes we can celebrate, and from which we can learn and improve.
During the evaluation phase of a customer result, your team may have already identified other valuable customer results to explore. You feed those back in the process and already look for the next customer results to join. Do You Want to Empower Humans to Build a Better Future? Then we’d love to meet you! Do You Want to Empower Humans to Build a Better Future? Do it! Find our jobs here.