Empowering teams for fast flow: ABC Glofox's journey to continuous delivery
Transitioning from traditional delivery models to continuous delivery presents unique challenges.
We've teamed up with ABC Fitness’ ABC Glofox to showcase how they achieved success with fast flow, with analysis and tips on how you can apply these changes in your organization. This is the second in our series of articles exploring how ABC Glofox made the shift to continuous delivery and achieved remarkable results. You can read the full showcase here.
As ABC Glofox transitioned through various startup funding phases, they encountered a significant hurdle: rapid growth. The company knew they had to work as a team to ensure they could scale at pace without sacrificing quality.
When Rob Meaney joined ABC Glofox as Senior Director of Engineering, he found a wealth of talent working in isolation. The company's strong commitment to customers sometimes led to losing sight of the bigger impact they could have, resulting in a huge volume of requests, and leaving little time to consult and reflect on what was best for ABC Glofox long-term. It was clear that change was required.
A transformation was proposed and actioned, focusing on three key areas: cultural change, principles, and practices, with the ultimate goal of establishing a generative culture.
Building a generative culture with fast flow
The team used DORA metrics to establish a baseline understanding of their performance. This data-driven approach allowed for more informed conversations about team formation and areas for improvement.
Investments were made in cultivating a learning culture by fostering psychological safety and free information flow, with product managers describing the 'what and why' of problems while teams focused on the 'how'. Insisting on blameless post-mortems for production incidents created a safe environment to share experiences, improve systems, and share lessons.
Restructuring teams for fast flow
Having observed the ways of working over a few weeks, ABC Glofox re-structured teams around domains and introduced user story mapping to kick off all work. This allowed these teams to focus on understanding the problem, limiting WIP (work-in-progress), and working together from start to finish. Kanban principles were implemented at department and team levels to visualize work, limit WIP, and drive continuous improvement.
While these changes initially slowed the developers down as they now had to come together to discuss problems as a team, it forced them to limit team WIP to the highest priority tasks. This had an almost immediate positive effect on the number of customer-impacting issues being reported.
Improved product quality and customer satisfaction
This transformation yielded significant improvements in customer satisfaction and product quality.
“In terms of business impact and customer outcomes, our teams are smashing our quarterly OKRs as they have really embraced an outcome-focused, iterative approach to product development. In fact, our teams have taken those original practices and replaced them with better, more effective practices for their context.”
— Rob Meaney, Senior Director of Engineering, ABC Glofox
Fast flow success showcase: ABC Glofox
The showcase is in four sections, each offering a unique perspective from different areas of the organization. We’ve included reflection prompts allowing you to consider the opportunities for change in your context, and commentary from Conflux experts to help you relate the ABC Glofox approach to your own situation.
Conflux specializes in coaching, consulting, and larger programs of engagement around fast flow and Team Topologies and is perfectly placed to showcase your organization’s best practices.
If you are looking to demonstrate competence, communicate cultural change, or attract talent, get in touch with us today.
