On the Membership team we’re switching up how we organise ourselves to help us be more effective. Here’s why and how we’re doing it.
Evolving with the product
As teams mature, ie, they get bigger and the scope of work widens, it’s not hard to figure out that they’ll need to reorganise. American investor Ben Horowitz famously wrote about this in the book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’. He said he believes that every time a team doubles in size, it should review its ways of working.
We’re doing something similar in the Membership team. Back in September, the product management team was just one person, Derek Harvie. Since we relaunched Membership, the scope of work has been getting larger so the team needs to scale up. The product team is now 4 people to reflect the change. One of those newbies is me.
Realising we’d outgrown stuff
When I joined, we had 3 teams: Blue, Orange and Pink. They were named after the colour of the post-it note that corresponded with what they were working on in the backlog. And that all made sense when the team was starting out; being lean and nimble negated the need to be aligned. But as our ambition for Membership grew, the team became more and more thinly spread and it became more difficult to properly focus on one thing, and really do it well.
Clarity around where we’re going (and how to know when we’ve got there)
We’ve introduced OKRs (objectives and key results) to make sure that everybody is moving together, in the same direction and aiming for the same things. Now, each team has a set of objectives and has agreed on a set of results that will show when it’s achieved what it set out to.
We looked for natural ways to split up the work so teams don’t have competing objectives. It means they can be in control of their own scope of work without lots of dependencies.
4 teams, 1 direction
At this point we naturally fell into 4 teams. This time, we’ve named them in a (slightly) more self-explanatory way. There’s:
- More members (recruiting more members)
- Member trading (looking at how our members shop with us)
- Member engagement (engaging with Membership, causes and community)
- Member services (managing the membership platform, ie, the backend infrastructure)
With clarity comes better prioritisation
Now we’re all on the same page we’ll find it easier to prioritise. Before, it was hard for the team to understand what to work on next because the tasks in the backlog fell into different areas.
Prioritising will be much simpler now we have the 4 teams working on different areas. Tasks are compared against other tasks from within that area so now it feels like we’re comparing apples with apples rather than apples with pears!
Better for us. Better for stakeholders
Working in this way is also really good in terms of how we’re working with stakeholders. The old way of working meant we had 30 plus stakeholders all wanting the tasks that fell under their area to be the priority. Hopefully, things will be calmer now each team has around 10 stakeholders to work with and include in decision making.
In a few more weeks we’ll be able to see if we’re achieving our targets and back it up with data, but at the moment it just feels like the right way to be working.
The team will continue to grow. Keep an eye on our work with us page.
Adam Warburton
Head of Membership Product
The Member engagement team deals with causes and community – will it also cover engagement with the Society’s democracy and member education?
Hi Callum, the member engagement team may get involved with our democratic progress and education, yes, although this would be alongside the existing teams that already look after those things.
With each team working with 10 stakeholders – how do decisions get made? Are there methods to make stakeholder feedback useful (and more importantly actionable?).
Hi Ross, we’re still in the early days, so still figuring this out. With a smaller number of stakeholders, it’ll be much easier to integrate them into the teams and make sure feedback is timely and contextual. OKRs provide a great framework for making decisions too as they try and remove subjectivity and help focus decision making.
Simple is best and post its and simple team names certainly cut the mustard.
Am concerned there is no ‘increasing member subscribed capital team’. Every penny of member capital matters, and with every £60,000 (1,000 members subscribing £80+ quid) one new freehold food can be fully outfitted to serve our new and growing communities. Leveraging retained earnings is all very well but the key there is it has to be earnt first and then investment returns go to the city rather to the balance sheet with the committed repayments.. If we have tens of new communities going up every year UK wide, and no food stores there ready and waiting there are no earnings to pay for everything. Capital upfront at low rates of interest is just what a co-op that almost lost a entire bank needs, whether thats from 65,000 new members, or from 4 old ones subscribing the full £20,000 max.
Why no ‘more member capital’ team?
???
Hello, the teams are focus on outcomes rather than specific iniatives we may run, which is why there wouldn’t be a specific team on member captial.
Adam. Take a second and please please read your comment. You’ll find it a nonsense. How is improving the co-ops ability to afford and leverage capital not a outcome? How exactly is it you think our co-op pays for things? Conch Shells? £70 million of member capital leveraged ten times gives 0.7 Billion to play with, add in the retained earnings, freeholds and property and I think you will find that is how things get paid for round 1 Angel Square. Why no digital on capital membership?
Your answer is not the real answer, maybe my question has never been asked so you just don’t know and find yourself making something up? Maybe the decision has been taken earlier ago than September last year so you weren’t in the team at the time? Maybe the co-op just likes being in a analogue dark age for its member capital raising?, not sure it matters which…
I ask again: Why is your team not optimising our member owned co-ops member ownership???? Why no digital alternative to our snail mail based, pen and paper, bound passbook system of the moment>? If you run out of capital, you are kaput. no?
I think your comment is unfair, and tone condescending. I’m more than happy to talk about the work we’re doing, but please keep the conversation respectful.