DevConf.US 2022

Delivering working software is a challenge that all teams face, and for most teams, the biggest challenge begins long before the first line of code is written! How do you know what to work on? How do you know what to deliver? How do you get the right level of engagement from developers and stakeholders alike? What do ‘they’ all want? In fact, who are ‘they’? These are important and often challenging questions that all teams have to answer, and this has become an even bigger challenge in the last 24 months with nearly everyone working from home! The ‘traditional’ approach of running a quarterly planning session involves hours in a meeting room, death by spreadsheets, documents and emails, and really lacks personality. Where is the human element? Where is the shared understanding between developers and customers in this model? We have found the lack of personality has hampered collaboration and innovation, simply by being boring and not being visually appealing, which is how alot of people learn! Within the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team we took an innovative Open Source UX approach, grounded in Design Thinking where we opened the team, stakeholders and customers' minds to a different, more visual and engaging approach to running quarterly planning - together. In this session, you will learn how Design Thinking works, how we created Movie Posters to represent our future initiatives, how the approach bolstered engagement which ultimately gave the initiatives the best chance of success by drawing insights and involvement from everyone from the very beginning. In fact, our team has had 100% successful delivery of all projects we take on, simply by introducing the 'fun' factor and getting more visual with our planning. Join us in Boston where we will share our new and original take on planning collaboratively through movie posters, and get some ideas on how you can introduce this in your team and give your planning some personality too!