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Describe Nero sprint states? | To-Do | To-Do
Here efood Marketing team include all the tasks efood Marketing team have to do in the sprint. efood Marketing team use paper notes for each task headline using the same color for all team members. | -1 |
Describe Nero sprint states? | In progress | In progress
Here are all the tasks that are currently in progress. efood Marketing team apply the rule of thumb that a maximum of two tasks must be a work in progress. | 0 |
Describe Nero sprint states? | Done | Done
The Done column includes all the completed tasks. By the time a task goes under the “done” column, it can’t go back. | 0 |
Describe Nero sprint states? | Blocked | Blocked
Blocked tasks are usually tasks that are blocked by third parties. Theoretically, efood Marketing team can include blocked tasks from our sub-teams, but most of the time, efood Marketing team manage to have a flow between our internal tasks. Blocked column acts as an indicator of our autonomy. Our latest request for a new Marketing member came from analyzing our Blocked tasks. | 0 |
Describe Nero sprint states? | Pool | Pool
In the “Pool” column efood Marketing team include all tasks that a team member can do in case they finish their tasks, and there is still time left within our sprint. This does not happen very often, but the pool can help us have preliminary planning for our next sprint. | 0 |
What does Nero Master during in Nero sprint? | works mostly on the “Blocked” stories | The Nero Master works mostly on the “Blocked” stories. Many stories have dependencies in other departments or other Marketing sub-teams, so the Nero Master tries to remove all the obstacles and do the necessary follow-ups so that everything can operate smoothly. Handling dependencies is a full-time job and a problem that unless you tackle efficiently it can kill the team’s efficiency and weaken its morale. For example, if you would like to implement a new tool for marketing automation, but your Finance department needs one month for the approval process, then Konstantinos can reassure you that your team will never try a new tool. | 16 |
What is performance increment? | team check our main business metrics and how they have evolved | According to Scrum, after each sprint, there is a product increment that the stakeholders can interact with. Since efood Marketing team work in Marketing, and efood Marketing team don’t have a product, after each sprint, efood Marketing team check our main business metrics and how they have evolved within our sprint. For our business, efood Marketing team have two core metrics. There are a lot of micro-goals that define the evolution of macro-goals that efood Marketing team set. efood Marketing team examine all of them to understand what worked well and what needs to be improved in the next sprint. Plus, efood Marketing team check how many tasks efood Marketing team have completed. Our focus is on business outcomes, though, since task completions do not pay for our salaries, while generating business revenue and happy customers and partners do. | 237 |
Give me a lesson you learn | Agile won’t necessarily increase your business performance | Being Agile won’t necessarily increase your business performance. It is of high importance that additional elements are implemented, such as an effective strategy or creativity to produce the best outcome. But efood Marketing team like to treat our “system” as a whole, not as separate parts since there is no value in creating a super-agile working process with a terrible strategy or a great strategy that requires burnouts in order to be successful. efood Marketing team are working to optimize our working process and strategy at the same time. | 6 |
Which tool you use? | Asana is our primary tool | Asana is our primary tool. You don't have to use Asana though, you can use your favorite tool since most of the popular project management platforms support similar functionalities . efood Marketing team organize the whole Marketing department in Asana. Everyone has the same permissions, everyone can add or edit tasks, and everyone can see everything. efood Marketing team do this to increase transparency and accountability across team members (after all, efood Marketing team have a history for every task). For Asana structure, efood Marketing team use “Asana Projects,” and the approach is the following:
- Marketing Backlog
- Marketing Sub-team Backlog
- Sprint Backlogs
Maintaining these backlogs can’t be done by a single individual. efood Marketing team assign OKR and channel backlog owners, while the Nero Committee has the overview and is 100% responsible for what is in and what is implemented. | 0 |
How do you measure how many days you need to deliver a task? | Velocity is the metric | Velocity is the metric Scrum uses to estimate a task. Since all stakeholders use the sense of time for delivery estimation, efood Marketing team needed to come up with something effective. This is how efood Marketing team came up with Nero Velocity which includes two metrics. Every task efood Marketing team have in our sprint is characterized by time estimation (1 point equals to 4 hours of work) and complexity (that can take values from 1 to 5). The scale is the following:
- 0.5 Time Point: 2 hours of work
- 1 Time Point: 4 hours of work
- 2 Time Points: 8 hours of work (1 day)
- 3 Time Points: 16 hours of work (2 days)
- 5 Time Points: 24 hours of work (3 days) | 0 |
How do you measure complexity? | With complexity points | - 1 complexity point: A little complex
- 2 complexity points: Complex
- 3 complexity points: Too complex
- 5 complexity points: Impossible to solve
(Zero complexity would be de-motivating, especially for the team dealing mostly with “little complex” tasks) | -1 |
Why you need both velocity & complexity? | because one does not fit all | We need two metrics because one does not fit all. An example is the task of ‘answering app store reviews in Play Store’ which may take four hours to be completed (one task point) and one complexity point. Another task called “budget alignment of a marketing channel” may take four hours of work (one task point) too, but its complexity is way higher than that of ‘answering app store reviews.’ | 20 |
Nero Velocity | Note: Nero Velocity took us | Note: Nero Velocity took us one year to implement. efood Marketing team started with time estimation and then, after thirty sprints, efood Marketing team added complexity. Evolution over fixation is essential for the adoption of new working processes. Also, it’s not easy to estimate how much time you need to complete a task. This knowledge is gained through experience and collaboration. If Konstantinos believe that to complete task X Konstantinos need no more than three hours, while you think that it should take ten hours, then efood Marketing team should discuss it and find a way to deliver the task in the fastest way possible, even when this task is not my favorite. This is part of the responsibility efood Marketing team have if efood Marketing team want to stay autonomous. Unless efood Marketing team challenge ourselves or our colleagues, efood Marketing team will end up with a process that, although it won’t involve any conflicts (because efood Marketing team won’t care about how efood Marketing team can achieve the best result in the fastest way) it will deliver poor results in terms of efficiency and it will be almost impossible to identify! | 0 |
Why should complexity be up to five? | If it is too complex, better segment it | Complexity follows the rule of thumb that says, “if it is too big, it should not be included in the sprint.” If it is too complex, better segment it into shorter tasks and, most of the time, the complexity will get a lower value. | 109 |
What are some Nero metrics? | Planned Velocity, Time and Complexity | Planned Velocity, Time and Complexity
After the completion of each sprint, efood Marketing team collect all task points regarding time and complexity per day of completion, per team member, per sub-team and as an overall department. efood Marketing team do that for every sprint to understand the dynamics behind every sprint planning. Rules that efood Marketing team set for sprint planning help us avoid significant fluctuations and be as realistic as efood Marketing team can be. | 0 |
What are some Nero metrics? | Achieved Velocity, Time and Complexity | Achieved Velocity, Time and Complexity
After completing a sprint, efood Marketing team collect time and complexity points efood Marketing team scored during a sprint along with other metrics (day of completion, team member, sub-team, department level). During our sprints, efood Marketing team see that the team’s standard deviation in each sprint is not vast. This means efood Marketing team can predict how many task points the team will deliver within the next sprint. Our purpose is not to increase velocity per se, however, there is always room for optimization. | 0 |
How to use these metrics? | Don’t use these metrics to criticize or reward your team | Don’t use these metrics to criticize or reward your team. If you do it, then everyone will focus on beautifying those metrics to avoid judgement or to get more rewards. This behavior is human nature. Alternatively, you can use these metrics to explore your team’s efficiency and understand if you can optimize it. This takes time. efood Marketing team have been using these metrics to have a better understanding about our planning capabilities as a department so far. | 0 |
Why Nero process is not a good way to validate team? | it doesn’t deal with the actual input that the team has to deliver | Optimizing the working process will help the team deliver projects on time without sacrificing quality, while maintaining a steady pace. However, it doesn’t deal with the actual input that the team has to deliver. efood Marketing team like to approach Nero as an end-to-end process. While efood Marketing team optimize our working process, efood Marketing team also optimize the input process so that only the best and most valuable projects are implemented. There are many prioritization frameworks, but efood Marketing team wanted to have a simple and lightweight one to help us apply prioritization between projects and identify the most valuable ones effectively. With Nero prioritization, when efood Marketing team create a project, efood Marketing team write down its objective (roughly) and all the necessary actions that need to be done to make the project happen. After writing down all the projects, efood Marketing team need to prioritize them. efood Marketing team start with the most valuable one and leave less valuable projects on hold. | 146 |
How team prioritizes? | Value, Confidence and Time estimation. | Prioritization score comes from 3 metrics: Value, Confidence and Time estimation. | 43 |
How do you measure value? | team use the Fibonacci method to compare the projects | For value, efood Marketing team use the Fibonacci method to compare the projects. efood Marketing team set the maximum Fibonacci value to 55. The most important project takes the best value, and then efood Marketing team arrange projects in descending order according to their value. Time estimation is the collection of the estimation points of the actions that are included in the project along with additional time points efood Marketing team may need to implement. Confidence is a metric that takes 1-10 values, and efood Marketing team came up with it to avoid mixing our personal opinion with the actual value of the project. efood Marketing team do not have a clear definition of how to value our confidence, but it works based on confidence relativity for each project.
Calculating Value, Confidence and Time provides us with a score for every project so that efood Marketing team know which project is the most valuable one. This prioritization framework promotes a balance across projects instead of us being positively biased towards big value projects. | 27 |
Why prioritization is important? | generating the best performance for the business. | When you watch a football game, you can understand that each player has specific things to do. Defenders will be evaluated by the number of successful tackles they’ll do, while attackers will be evaluated by the number of goals they will score. The whole team, though, will be evaluated by the final result. efood Marketing team like to think of prioritization in the same way. Every project will be evaluated according to relevant metrics (performance marketing – cost per conversion, content marketing – the number of blog visits, etc.) but the whole team will be evaluated by the number of conversions (along with targeted cost per conversion) and user satisfaction that they will generate. An effective prioritization will provide a balance across different projects and initiatives while generating the best performance for the business. | 793 |
What is root cause analysis? | dig deep into the problem and identify the root cause | Root cause analysis is known as the 5 Whys, and it’s a popular method created by Toyota. Its purpose is to dig deep into the problem and identify the root cause. This is not an easy process because it requires courage and trust within the team. Everyone must understand that they should not be looking for someone to blame, but they should be searching for the real problem to provide the best solution. | 107 |
How root cause works? | sequencing one question after another, | It works by sequencing one question after another, like this: - Why was task X (poorly written) in the sprint? - Because efood Marketing team thought it was well-written. - Why did you think it was well written? - Because efood Marketing team briefly discussed it, and efood Marketing team thought efood Marketing team were aligned. - What is the process that efood Marketing team follow for that kind of task? - efood Marketing team have a meeting with team member A and team leader and confirm it with everyone to proceed. - Why did you skip this meeting? Because… the team leader was away. - Since the team leader was away and you followed the wrong procedure, why didn’t you pick any other task instead? - Because… our backlog had no other ready tasks. | 12 |
Why you call tasks as stories? | every story has a beginning and an ending | efood Marketing team like to treat our tasks as stories because, according to storytelling principles, every story has a beginning and an ending. efood Marketing team want our tasks to have a starting point (why efood Marketing team are doing this) and an end result. | 103 |
What tasks include? | Headline, tags, description, acceptance criteria, notes | For each task efood Marketing team add: | -1 |
What tasks include? | headline | Task headline
The headline must be concise and short. | 4 |
What tasks include? | Relevant tags | Relevant tags
Tags help us categorize our tasks. Our current tags are “brand” since efood Marketing team have three different brands, and “marketing team” to identify which team will work on it. | 0 |
What tasks include? | Short description | Short description
The description must be short and clear so that the reader can understand the task. efood Marketing team use the following template: “As a [team member role], Konstantinos want to [action] so that [result]… | -1 |
What tasks include? | Acceptance criteria | Acceptance criteria
Acceptance criteria are facts efood Marketing team set for a task to be considered as done. So for a new campaign, efood Marketing team need all the defined assets in place, to have the right budget, to set the right cost targets (cost per conversion), the right audience, the right placement, to avoid overlapping with existing campaigns, and to launch it. | 20 |
What tasks include? | Notes | Notes
Here efood Marketing team write everything that doesn’t fall under any of the categories above. | -1 |
Who is the most important stakeholder? | the most important are our customers | Who is the most important stakeholder? Is it the CEO? The CMO? Someone who can provide insightful analyses and data-driven optimization projects? Of course, all the above are important, BUT the most important are our customers and partners. They pay for our salaries and if they are not happy they will abandon our service. They do not act as regular stakeholders, though. They do not set specific deadlines, they do not provide clear specs, and they have no authority. But they are the ones that contribute the most to our business growth, and they care only for the value that is delivered through our platform or service. | 190 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | Work in progress limits | Work in progress limits
Team members are not allowed to work simultaneously on more than two tasks. This limit helps people focus on one or two tasks and try to complete them before proceeding to the next one. Also, another interesting side effect of this rule is that people have to do proper planning. Otherwise, they’ll get stuck and fail to deliver. | -1 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | If a task is big, exclude form the sprint | If a task is big, it will not be included in the sprint
Let’s say that you planned a task that will take you four days to complete. You will start it at first, and for four days no one will know what you are doing or if the task has progressed at all. If you have a big task, break it down into smaller tasks to be accepted. A task that may take more than one day to be completed is not accepted, so you need to break it down. | -1 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | Do not plan for 100% of the sprint | Do not plan for 100% of the sprint
Do not plan for 40 hours. Okay, you will be present in the office 40 hours per week, but you won’t be productive all the time. Besides that, non-planned tasks will emerge, and you need to be flexible to complete them (if they are valuable). Remember, efood Marketing team have Nero events to reduce the number of working hours as well. Most of the time efood Marketing team plan for 32 hours, which means efood Marketing team believe that one day will be spent on Nero events and potential unplanned tasks. | 0 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | Use Nero allocation | Use Nero allocation
There are several types of tasks. Tasks that are part of the long-term strategy (OKRs), tasks efood Marketing team do every week and tasks with “fresh” ideas and other urgent matters. efood Marketing team allocate 45% to OKRs, 30% to fresh ideas, 25% to recurring tasks, which (at least for us) promotes a balance between them and helps us achieve delivering our projects and the maximum value. | -1 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | Document everything that matters | Document everything that matters
Some tasks take 20 minutes to be completed, and some others take 30. efood Marketing team do not document them because the time to create the task and add it in the sprint is longer than the actual effort to complete it. efood Marketing team just have to be sure that this will not be repeated. Our general rule is; if a task takes less than 30 minutes to complete, it won’t be included in the sprint, and efood Marketing team accept only a couple of such tasks within a sprint. Remember, this framework is not about time tracking but about bringing the most valuable tasks on top and make sure that efood Marketing team implement them properly. | 0 |
What are some rules of thumb for Nero? | Use goals as a prioritization | Use goals as a prioritization compass (when needed)
From sprint to sprint efood Marketing team add a goal for each team. Goals are always related to a group of tasks. However, it is rare for a goal to be related to all tasks. The group of tasks correlated with the Goal is the top priority. The teams should start their sprints with those tasks no matter what. | 0 |
What are the types of waste? | Muri, mura, muda | Speaking about waste
Taiichi Ohno, the father of Toyota Product System, talked about three different types of waste. He used Muri waste, for unreasonableness, which efood Marketing team tackle through clear-cut strategy and quarterly OKRs. Mura waste, for inconsistency, which efood Marketing team tackle with the discipline that can be generated by creating a system that people love and not just a system for the system’s sake. Lastly, Muda waste, for outcomes which efood Marketing team tackle by having a solid evaluation framework so that efood Marketing team know whether they are functional or not. | -1 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 1: Setup the principles | Step 1: Setup the principles
The first step is to set up the principles and foundation of your Agile working process. Shape it and confirm with the team to increase commitment. Let everyone understand that it’s a process embraced by them and not forced from above. You can use as many Nero elements you want and experiment with other techniques from Scrum and Kanban as well. Create short documentation and keep it handy so that everyone can refer to it whenever they have a question. | 5 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 2: Setup your strategy | Step 2: Setup your strategy
Once you have your principles in place, it is time to set up your strategy. It’s not mandatory for other methodologies, but Nero’s success is heavily dependent on your strategy. Structure your Marketing objectives, define your success metrics, shape the team’s responsibilities and identify your main initiatives for the next three months. | 5 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 3: Create your backlog | Step 3: Create your backlog
The third step is to create your backlog in Asana or Trello. Usually, a backlog consists of your ideas, but in Nero, our backlog consists of our three-month initiatives (OKRs), our ongoing and routine processes, tasks that are part of our initiatives, and nice to have ideas and future concepts. If you have the best mapping, you will achieve the best planning. | 5 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 4. Create your three-month OKRs | Step 4. Create your three-month OKRs
Now that you have your backlog, your next step is to prioritize your three-month initiatives (OKRs) -Refer to the prioritization section for more information on the prioritization model). Start creating the tasks that will help you achieve your highest priority OKRs (depending on how many you have). This will help you create your first sprint with valuable tasks. | 5 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 5: Create your first sprint | Step 5: Create your first sprint
Time for your first sprint. Apply Nero allocation for your tasks to each team member. Confirm it with the team and set up your physical board using paper notes. Add goals where applicable. Ideally, start it on a Monday, and the next day start with your daily standup and then let your team start doing what they have planned to do, trying to minimize external distractions and requests. Since you have one week, plan most of the external requests you can handle for the next sprint (besides super urgent tasks). | 5 |
Provide me a step by step guide to start using Nero | 6: Measure and optimize | Step 6: Measure and optimize business and team’s performance
Once your first sprint is completed, you can measure your team’s performance and business performance. It is recommended you start only with time estimation. Adding complexity is not easy for a marketer to digest. Start with time estimation, and when your team is ready, add complexity. Do the Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospectives sessions and start planning your next sprint, which will include possible leftover tasks from your last one, feedback from retrospectives and other tasks according to Nero allocation. | 5 |
What are the benefits of Nero? | Efficiency, focus, communication, alignment & empathy, speed | null | -1 |
How we can measure efficiency? | total delivered projects, productive hours per week, weekly performance increment | Efficiency is a vast topic. Before efood Marketing team analyze it, efood Marketing team want to say that efood Marketing team use the term “efficiency” rather than productivity, because efood Marketing team are humans, not machines. efood Marketing team are living in the information era and our job is not to produce X amount of parts in X amount of time. Our job is more fluid and it requires creativity, collaboration and actual work to make it happen. It has many aspects, and its success can be measured in different ways, such as total delivered projects, productive hours per week, weekly performance increment, etc. | 537 |
How we can measure efficiency? | We handle efficiency from two main points of view | We handle efficiency from two main points of view; the performance point of view and the team point of view. From a performance standpoint, we’ve hit all our aggressive targets within the optimal cost consistently for the past years. During those years efood Marketing team haven’t been doing the same projects. Instead, efood Marketing team have been adjusting them to solve current problems. When efood Marketing team started, efood Marketing team were a startup with potential. Now, efood Marketing team are one of the largest marketing teams in Greece, so the challenges are not the same anymore. Although the numbers of delivered projects are increasing, the projects efood Marketing team complete are better and refined, well-thought and tightly aligned with our performance targets. From a team point of view, efood Marketing team do a survey every three months, asking our team members if they feel productive and what efood Marketing team can do to achieve more. The feedback is positive. As they say, they feel very productive, and our working process helps them achieve that. A working process needs to have high adoption levels from the team. Otherwise, it does not lead to successful implementation. It is natural to have many processes when you have many people working in your team. It will also add much “process” time. With Nero, efood Marketing team minimize the significant amount of “process” time and focus more on “productive” hours to generate value and traction. Meetings count as “process” time as well. That’s why efood Marketing team have specific hours allocated to meetings each week, and efood Marketing team are not allowed to spend more on them (both for external and internal meetings). | 0 |
Efficiency | From a team point of | From a team point of view, efood Marketing team do a survey every three months, asking our team members if they feel productive and what efood Marketing team can do to achieve more. The feedback is positive. As they say, they feel very productive, and our working process helps them achieve that. A working process needs to have high adoption levels from the team. Otherwise, it does not lead to successful implementation. It is natural to have many processes when you have many people working in your team. It will also add much “process” time. With Nero, efood Marketing team minimize the significant amount of “process” time and focus more on “productive” hours to generate value and traction. Meetings count as “process” time as well. That’s why efood Marketing team have specific hours allocated to meetings each week, and efood Marketing team are not allowed to spend more on them (both for external and internal meetings). | 0 |
Why Nero is useful? | helped us become better planners | Planning process helped us become better planners. efood Marketing team tend to create small projects that have a better chance to be delivered and do not exhaust the whole team. So efood Marketing team save energy for iterations, too. Suppose you needed 100 working hours to move one step, would it be easy for you to go back? Now think that you need two hours to make a step. You would definitely go back to change or optimize that step and proceed faster to the next one and have more chances to complete your project on time. The feeling of completion increases the pleasure of working because an end-result can be measured, evaluated and optimized easier than a semi-completed or ongoing/endless project. | 17 |
Give me a thoughful tip | Systematize everything | Creating systems is a matter of perspective. In our Agile journey, efood Marketing team try to systematize everything that matters because efood Marketing team believe that systems will help us scale and increase our efficiency. An interesting example here is the system efood Marketing team created for brainstorming sessions. Before Nero, when efood Marketing team had a brainstorming session, efood Marketing team just threw around every idea efood Marketing team had on the selected topic. Now, before a brainstorming session, efood Marketing team prepare our ideas and apply methods of brainstorming (like “originality pane” and “category stealing”) that efood Marketing team found in a book of how to generate ideas by Kevin Duncan. “Piñata,” the name of one of our main features was conceived from a meeting like this. To be honest, Konstantinos did not believe that brainstorming could be systematized, but now Konstantinos can’t work without it. | -1 |
Why focus is important? | There is a ton of projects that are waiting in the queue | There is a ton of projects that are waiting in the queue to be implemented. Projects that efood Marketing team believe in, projects suggested by our users, projects our stakeholders suggest and optimization projects of past initiatives that efood Marketing team could have delivered in a better way. Since our resources are not infinite, efood Marketing team need to optimize our pipeline, including projects that will affect business performance positively, along with other aspirational or non-measurable projects. | 0 |
Is efficiency correlated with focus? | Yes it is correlated. | Efficiency is correlated with focus. By the time you can focus on a specific project avoiding all distractions, your working performance can be increased radically. Focus does not mean that efood Marketing team work in our silos, having only one task at a time. efood Marketing team want to convey that efood Marketing team are trying to cultivate a productive environment within an existing and busy marketing department. | -1 |
Give me a useful tip | small projects, small risk. | We tend to implement small projects (as efood Marketing team mentioned above). Small projects require small decisions. Small decisions help you focus on and manage risks easier. Imagine you need to make a big bet (with the required analysis and anxiety that it comes with), or you would instead prefer to make multiple small bets that you can easily change. | -1 |
If focus correlated with value? | focus is correlated with value | Finally, focus is correlated with value. If you know that the project you are dealing with is valuable for the company, then you will try harder and avoid working on a useless project with zero value. | 9 |
Is focus correlated with prioritization? | it helped us identifying the best projects | Nero prioritization helped us a lot in identifying the best and most valuable projects, bringing value to our department and our company in general. Realizing the potential value of each project was a big step towards proper prioritization. Prioritization, as an initiative, helps promote: | -1 |
Where prioritization is helpful? | Teamwork | Teamwork
Teams prioritize on their own, and the Nero committee has to do the global prioritization and re-prioritization. Technically everyone in the marketing team is involved in the prioritization process, so teamwork is mandatory. | -1 |
Where prioritization is helpful? | Data-driven decisions | Data-driven decisions
Since efood Marketing team challenge our inner confidence with the potential delivered value efood Marketing team must embrace a more data-driven approach to better support our projects. | 0 |
Where prioritization is helpful? | No HiPPO | No HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) decision-making process
Although efood Marketing team have a CMO and managers, efood Marketing team like to have everyone involved in the prioritization process and cultivate engaging instead of having manipulated marketing professionals. | 0 |
Where prioritization is helpful? | Iterative mindset | Iterative mindset:
Continuous prioritization without blindly following the plan helps our team in building an iterative mindset. This helps us build an Agile culture and introduce prioritization in every aspect that it can be useful. Prioritized projects will be included in OKRs, then you should prioritize the one that needs to be implemented first, later prioritize the tasks of the first OKR project and finally, re-prioritize other tasks to add them on weekly sprints. | 0 |
Does Nero helps in communication? | Internal communication within the Marketing department works excellent | Communication optimization between team members and other departments is a never-ending process. Internal communication within the Marketing department works excellent with all events and processes that efood Marketing team discussed above. efood Marketing team gather daily, review our performance weekly, re-adjust our strategy every quarter, etc. But communication with other departments is complicated. Other departments have their own prioritization, their own roadmaps, their own processes and they don’t have the same way of thinking, simply because they are not marketers. When there were smaller teams within the company, efood Marketing team didn’t have a process about requests because efood Marketing team could communicate everything efood Marketing team wanted, fast and easily. efood Marketing team simply went to the person who was responsible for the project and discussed it. efood Marketing team called it “the corridor approach” because most of the time, efood Marketing team discussed projects during lunch, in the corridors, or on our cigarette breaks. This simply doesn’t work now that the teams are bigger. efood Marketing team decided upon creating a process and adding one rule of communication between departments. | 97 |
Does team focus on the problem or the solution? | team focus on the problem and minimize the time spent on solution | When efood Marketing team communicate a request to or receive a request from another department, efood Marketing team ask as many details as efood Marketing team can, focusing on the problem description. efood Marketing team created that rule after reading a great blogpost from Avinash Kaushik called “Rebel! Refuse report requests. Only answer business questions, FTW”. efood Marketing team decided to focus solely on the problem description and minimize the time spent on solution discussion for three reasons: | -1 |
What is curse of knowledge? | pattern when you have vast knowledge on a topic but find it very hard to explain it to people | Tackle the “Curse of knowledge”
“Curse of knowledge” is a term that efood Marketing team found in the book “Made to Stick.” It refers to a pattern that humans that have vast knowledge on a topic find it very hard to explain it to people that are unaware of it. Curse of knowledge is a big problem between department communication. Providing (or asking for) details about the problem efood Marketing team are trying to solve helps us better understand the problem and provide a better solution. | -1 |
Give me an example of focusing on the problem | When the Business team asks | When the Business team asks us to expand in new audiences, efood Marketing team need to understand what they have in mind. Do efood Marketing team really need expansion, or efood Marketing team need to re-activate churned users? Do efood Marketing team want geographic or demographic expansion? Do efood Marketing team have an additional budget for this? What is the timeframe? How big should this expansion be? Will other departments participate in the initiative as well? efood Marketing team ask those along with other relevant questions to understand the problem before efood Marketing team design the solution for it. | 0 |
Why communication is useful for a team? | Increase trust and ownership | Increase trust and ownership
Most of the time (before efood Marketing team used the rule), time allocation of a project discussion meeting was like this: 50% of the meeting was dedicated to problem description and 50% to solution discussion. This had two negative results. The first is that, using only 50% of our meeting time for the problem description, efood Marketing team couldn’t understand the problem 100% and explore all the additional opportunities and threats that were raised along with this problem. The second is that for the solution discussion, you need to trust the expert and not try to force your suggestions. efood Marketing team call it the “leap of faith.” By allowing the experts to decide which solution will work best you increase trust between departments and give ownership to the people that will implement the project because the answer will ultimately come from their ideas. | 0 |
Why empathy is important? | team need to excel in all three pillars | In our team efood Marketing team have professionals that focus on users providing user-centric campaigns and content, professionals that focus on restaurants, trying to optimize our partnerships and professionals that are performance-driven and try to optimize our spending and hit our financial targets. You need to have empathy as a team in order to understand that if efood Marketing team want to excel, efood Marketing team need to excel in all three pillars because if efood Marketing team don’t and efood Marketing team only focus on one or two, due to the nature of our business (marketplace), efood Marketing team will fail. efood Marketing team need to adjust our priorities and our projects so that efood Marketing team have happy users, happy partners and a healthy business and this is trickier than it sounds. | 423 |
Why empathy is important? | Empathy and data-driven decisions are the keys to ideal prioritization. | If you are a user-centric professional, you are biased towards user-centric projects because this is what you understand better and helps you do projects that you like. Empathy helps every professional understand our business and that efood Marketing team need to take care of restaurants and budget optimization as well. Empathy and data-driven decisions are the keys to ideal prioritization. | 322 |
How to develop empathy? | make sure that everyone understands the industry and the business | Another helpful way to build empathy is to make sure that everyone understands the industry and the business. In order to achieve that, efood Marketing team include extensive business analysis and discussions within the onboarding process. Every professional should be able to understand what the threats and opportunities in the marketplace business are and how this affects his/her day-to-day tasks. efood Marketing team do not live in a silo. Our performance is highly affected by the success of other departments, so their requests should be handled with the necessary priority. If the sales department is asking for designs for a restaurant case study and efood Marketing team don’t provide them with the best designs in time, they won’t be able to add new restaurants, so our users won’t be able to order their favorite food, so our revenue will decrease. As simple as that. | 43 |
How to develop empathy? | Seth godin on empathy | Here is a great post from Seth Godin about empathy: “Empathy doesn't involve feeling sorry for someone. It is our honest answer to the question, "why did they do what they did?" The useful answer is rarely "because they're stupid." Or even, "because they're evil." In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from. Dismissing actions efood Marketing team don't admire merely because efood Marketing team don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change efood Marketing team seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart” | -1 |
Is overprocessing contribute towards better development speed? | No, its the opposite, overprocessing is negative to speed | “Overprocessing” is one of the seven major types of waste, according to “The Toyota Way.” When you start a new framework, you don’t know how much “process” is too much “process.” Every time you add processes, you lose speed. That is something inevitable. efood Marketing team knew that before implementing Nero, that’s why efood Marketing team created a custom framework that is lean enough. Speed is one of the most critical assets for the team and the business, so efood Marketing team are not willing to sacrifice it in favor of full control and better predictability. If you want to stay relevant, you must be fast. Most of the examples described in this book are highly correlated with speed. | -1 |
Give me a thoughtful quote | “The quick shall inherit the earth.” | There is a very interesting section from the “Red book” that every Facebook employee has on their desk: | -1 |
Give me a thoughtful quote | who ship quickly can improve quickly | Those who ship quickly can improve quickly. | 6 |
What is a disadvantagement of speed? | Sometimes things break | Adding speed, of course, has some cons as well. Sometimes things break. Other times the quality is not top-notch. But if you have good speed and delivery cadence in place, all these problems are manageable. For us, speed is a mindset. If you don’t have in mind that you have to ship something fast you will always find excuses to deliver it later. Don’t do it. | 48 |
What is a disadvantagement of speed? | the quality is not top-notch | Adding speed, of course, has some cons as well. Sometimes things break. Other times the quality is not top-notch. But if you have good speed and delivery cadence in place, all these problems are manageable. For us, speed is a mindset. If you don’t have in mind that you have to ship something fast you will always find excuses to deliver it later. Don’t do it. | 84 |
What is more important speed or quality? | It depends on the situation | This debate is one of our favorites because every time efood Marketing team face it, efood Marketing team reach different conclusions. efood Marketing team can’t systematize the process of when efood Marketing team should prioritize projects against speed or quality. efood Marketing team tried, but there are so many variables that affect it (competition, time period, the urgency of the request, the size of the request, etc.) that can’t be systematized. The only contract that efood Marketing team have between us is that efood Marketing team should be okay with something less than perfect, but efood Marketing team should care enough so that efood Marketing team won’t create something that is below our standards. If you have experienced the same pain and you have found a better solution, feel free to share it with us, feedback is more than welcome. | -1 |
What is a challenge when it comes to adopt Nero? | Managing Change | The first barrier that efood Marketing team had and still have is that efood Marketing team have to overcome ourselves and change. Change is always difficult. Even though efood Marketing team like Nero, efood Marketing team must change our working behavior to comply with its rules and follow the process. Plus, if efood Marketing team don’t get at least 75% of the team’s buy-in it simply won’t work. | -1 |
Questions that challenged the adoption of Nero | Everything is known | “Why should efood Marketing team prioritize our projects since efood Marketing team have deadlines and efood Marketing team know that efood Marketing team need to deliver all of them?” | -1 |
Questions that challenged the adoption of Nero | Time spend on rituals could be spend on working | “Why should efood Marketing team gather every day and describe what efood Marketing team are doing and waste time that efood Marketing team could otherwise use to deliver more, or have a longer break?” | -1 |
Questions that challenged the adoption of Nero | I don't care what my teammates are doing | “Why should Konstantinos know what a copywriter is doing while Konstantinos am mostly interested in my performance channel and Konstantinos get paid only to optimize this channel?” | -1 |
Questions that challenged the adoption of Nero | I dont want to discuss my problems with the team | “Why should Konstantinos discuss my problems openly with other team members that can’t even help with the solution?” | -1 |
What is a challenge when it comes to adopt Nero? | added an “unnecessary” workload to our already heavy workload | These are some doubts that efood Marketing team have faced from time to time and, to be honest, they are reasonable, especially in crisis periods when efood Marketing team needed to work more to deliver our projects and all these processes added an “unnecessary” workload to our already heavy workload.
We are marketers. Most of us are experienced in the marketing landscape, which mostly follows the traditional working process of the waterfall. efood Marketing team were born and raised in waterfall environments, without tolerance towards iterations and continuous changes. Discussing change had always been the elephant in the room. Thus, switching to the Agile method was very difficult. That’s why efood Marketing team did not force it, but efood Marketing team embraced it little by little, step by step. Imagine a situation where you must make multiple changes in the way you are used to working, while you have to work hard to achieve aggressive performance targets. This has been our team for the last two years. efood Marketing team work in a naturally fast-paced environment in a new and growing industry; the online delivery industry is about ten years old, which means efood Marketing team have to move faster. Inconsistency is the number one threat for our Nero framework, while lack of discipline is the second. If efood Marketing team do not keep it consistent, efood Marketing team cannot implement it right and get the best outcome. If there is no discipline or commitment, efood Marketing team will be led to incomplete tasks. | 240 |
How do you cope with change management? | develop a habit around it. | The only way to manage change is to develop a habit around it. The first thing efood Marketing team did was to standardize the process. Since efood Marketing team couldn’t avoid changes, efood Marketing team made only small changes and followed the process religiously. Imagine there were even times efood Marketing team ran the events without having something to say. efood Marketing team discussed the delivered value of the process after each sprint so that everyone realized that the process was helpful. Repetition increased consistency, while delivered value increased the discipline levels needed to establish it and make an investment in it as a department.Still this is the main obstacle that efood Marketing team face every time efood Marketing team are tweaking the process. | 36 |
Give me a thoughtful quote | It is your commitment on the process that will determine your progress | “It is your commitment on the process that will determine your progress” ~ James Clear | 1 |
How do you cope with change management? | stay consistent and keep optimizing the process | Having a process that no one has asked for is not easy. Having a process that no one else has (so it’s not considered credible) it’s not easy. efood Marketing team established Nero because efood Marketing team wanted to. But, there are times when the pressure is on and efood Marketing team don’t like it. There are times when new professionals come and they can’t understand it, or they are having a hard time adopting it. There are times when stakeholders demand more approval processes because efood Marketing team have made a mistake. There are times when people insist that without it efood Marketing team would be more productive and deliver more projects. Remember, this is not a single race, this is a marathon and efood Marketing team need to stay consistent and keep optimizing the process as long as it delivers value for both team members as individual professionals and the team as a whole. | 752 |
Any tips on change management? | Start simple & easy | Start simple & easy
You don’t need to create long-form description tasks, write a simple description with all the valuable information and nothing more than that. Time and iterations will show you the way of the “perfect” story description. After all, most of the stories will be written and executed by the same person so there is little or no risk of miscommunication. Also, you can start by adding only the important stories in the first sprints and then gradually add all the stories that you will implement within the sprint. | 0 |
Any tips on change management? | Add everyone on board | Add everyone on board
Don’t let people out of the process. If you don’t add everyone you won’t be able to create a habit around it. When efood Marketing team first started, our colleague Antonis was not willing to participate in the process but the rest of the team urged him to join. Now, he is one of our most passionate ambassadors even though he is not part of our team anymore (he embraced Nero in his next team). | 0 |
Any tips on change management? | Praise people for their planning activities | Praise people for their planning activities
Praise people that are good planners. Praise your Nero Master for his/her contribution. Praise the whole team for their effort and collaboration. By praising people for their planning you reinforce them to continue investing in it. By the way, this will help you make “appraisal” a habit as well ;) | 0 |
Give me a lesson you learned | Two steps forward, one step back | During our Agile journey, efood Marketing team faced a lot of dead-ends and tons of resistance. There were times when efood Marketing team decided to abandon it and reintroduce our old process (traditional waterfall method). However, efood Marketing team continued. As an old manager says: Two steps forward, one step back result in one step forward and one lesson that will lead to the next improvement. | 290 |
What is the a scalability challenge? | communicating with other teams or departments becomes even harder. | Creating silos in big teams and departments is common. A large team needs time to communicate and align itself, so communicating with other teams or departments becomes even harder. There were six of us in the beginning. People changed; four people left, they were replaced, and then efood Marketing team scaled to a multifunctional 20 people marketing department that has 90% of marketing channels operations in-house. Nero helped us not only to scale but also maintain our team bonding level. efood Marketing team gather every day in our daily standup, discussing our concerns and ideas, asking for help, and providing feedback, which helps our team members have a closer relationship with each other.
Scalability can be very dangerous. It can lead to communication problems, priorities setup problems, budgeting problems and dependency problems among internal teams or between the marketing and other departments. The team is growing bigger and bigger, and efood Marketing team need to make changes to adapt and solve our current problems. Our framework is changing because our team is changing, as well. If efood Marketing team scaled the team without this framework efood Marketing team will be doomed for failure. Before you decide that you will scale your team, make sure that you will have a set of principles in place that are applied and make sense for everyone. | 115 |
What is the a scalability challenge? | team need more planning hours to stay aligned | For example, as the team grows bigger, efood Marketing team need more planning hours to stay aligned. So, efood Marketing team took a step back and looked up in the bibliography for solutions. And efood Marketing team came up with a hybrid idea; to implement the Kanban flow with weekly sprints. So, every Monday, efood Marketing team don’t plan for the whole week ahead. efood Marketing team plan our next three tasks for implementation for each team member, keeping all other rules of thumb in place, and add them under the To-Do column. When tasks in the To-Do list hit zero, efood Marketing team bring in the next three tasks and add them to the list. This creates an asynchronous planning, which would have led to chaos, but for us, since efood Marketing team already have this framework in place, it works well and minimizes the planning hours within the week. This is something that efood Marketing team are currently testing within the Performance Team to evaluate its performance and decide whether efood Marketing team roll it out to the whole team or revert to our existing process. | 55 |
What is the a scalability challenge? | daily standup last for more than 40 minutes- which is very long | Geekbot is another example. When efood Marketing team started our daily standups it used to take us a couple of minutes. As the team grew (and mostly when efood Marketing team had 360 campaigns), it used to last for more than 40 minutes- which is very long. That’s why efood Marketing team moved to Geekbot and automated the whole process. Now, a daily standup lasts ten minutes with better results while efood Marketing team save the notes for documentation as well. Last but not least, this is how efood Marketing team removed our physical board as well. Before the change efood Marketing team had to write down our paper notes with our tasks and document them in Asana, too. This was time-consuming with no additional value. At present, each team works internally and adds everything in Asana without adding the tasks on the physical board. By doing this efood Marketing team achieve the same results and efood Marketing team save time. | -1 |
Why offline marketing teams find difficult to implement Nero? | Offline activities are contradictory to the Agile nature | From sprint to sprint, efood Marketing team realized that Nero was not working properly across all Marketing sub-teams, especially for our offline marketing activities. efood Marketing team understood that their workflow is not optimal and does not fit 100% in Nero. Offline marketers work with third-party partners, which is a problem that has multiple side effects such as external dependencies, lack of autonomy, and a larger process (confirmation, specs, definition, etc.), which are contradictory to the Agile nature. | -1 |
Why offline marketing teams find difficult to implement Nero? | the pace of offline marketing efforts is not comparable to digital campaigns at all | Also, the pace of offline marketing efforts is not comparable to digital campaigns at all. Creating an offline marketing campaign requires multiple steps (confirm campaign with the publisher, get specific specs, create images, confirm and then publish them) while doing a campaign on Facebook requires about half of the steps and one-tenth of the time (at least in our case, where the manager is the one who implements the campaign as well). | 6 |
Why offline marketing teams find difficult to implement Nero? | offline marketing is very expensive | Last but not least, being Agile in offline marketing is very expensive. Expensive in terms of time and money. efood Marketing team can’t create multiple TV ads for testing. efood Marketing team can’t re-iterate ten times on a TV ad, simply because for every iteration efood Marketing team need to re-shoot the ad, which is very expensive. efood Marketing team can’t experiment in our partnerships because they are based on detailed contracts that require many approvals to be altered. This does not mean that offline tasks are not included in our sprints. efood Marketing team do our best to be aligned and have the best planning in place to have the same process for everyone. | 35 |
Give me a tip to implement Nero | Apply it when matters | Apply when it matters
Carefully examine your offline activities flow and apply Nero whenever it matters. For example, efood Marketing team started adding in Nero only the offline campaigns that were part of our 360 marketing campaigns to make sure that efood Marketing team wouldn’t risk the performance or execution of big marketing campaigns. | -1 |
Give me a tip to implement Nero | Don’t apply it | Don’t apply it
Yes, that’s an option too. Do not apply it if you think that it can’t deliver any value. As Konstantinos said early in this book, removing processes is more difficult than adding new ones. Try it, and if it doesn't make sense, skip it. If you make any changes that work, feel free to email them to me to apply them as well | 0 |
Give me a useful tip | The most effective way to do it is to do it! | The most effective way to do it is to do it! | 0 |