Who is the intended audience for this project?
Our audience is mainly the engineering teams of Wayfair. In particular, those who work with agile methodologies.
Waytro is supposed to give a funnier and easier solution to the retrospective ceremony while adding security and other features like records, analytics, etc. to the process.
What problem is this trying to solve?
During retrospective, Wayfair teams use different tools and third-party software such as GDocs or FunRetro. This leads to a problem of standardization and security. We are sharing internal information with other companies that can be sensible.
Also often we do not check past retros because they’re in different places or at least harder to reach. So keeping the history of everything we do there is also something to solve and at the same time, we can integrate the new tool with the rest of Wayfair's internal tools.
And last, sometimes ceremonies tend to be boring and not attractive enough to really share our thoughts. We’re trying to create a very simple, clean and even fun solution that helps the team to focus on the important things of the ceremony.
What is the proposed solution?
Create an application integrated into Wayfair's system. It should have a clean design with an easy way of following some structured path. It should also make sure old comments are not lost for upcoming retros.
In the future, we could create an analytics system with metrics like: Recurrent problems Problems without solutions Useful and unuseful actions
The application should be very easy to use and follow the next steps: Main board to work individually where every member of the team adds cards or comments on them before the ceremony. When the ceremony starts: Bad cards from the last retro will appear and the team should decide if that issue was resolved or is a ‘carry over’ for the new sprint. Then actions should be added. Check new cards added from team members. These will appear randomly (good and bad) and comments and actions should be placed on them When finished, the resulting board will appear and give the whole picture of the retro
To keep the team posted an email should be sent with the resulting board.
How technically feasible is this solution?
Could be developed by a Wayfair team. Estimation of time would be 4 people during 1 week plus the analytics system which would require more study to give relevant information
How does this solution benefit the intended audience (and anyone else)? What is the impact?
In Wayfair, we work in a very dynamic environment, which changes over time in the context of teams and people. On every team, Retrospective sessions are done with different tools and approaches because there is no better standard way is presented. This tool is not only going to add a Wayfair culture to the Retrospective meetings also when changing teams, getting used to the different approach of the different team will be eliminated. On the other hand, with currently used tools, tracking of an individual topic is not available. For instance, an action that didn’t resolve issues from the previous retrospective will be missed on the next meeting. With Waytro we intend to help team members and managers to have a better vision over issues, their solutions and keeping unresolved issues in the board until an effective action is taken and also rewarding team by adding resolved issues into the good section.
What is the potential business and customer impact, and how do you intend on measuring it?
Our customers are Wayfair engineering teams. Now they will have an easy, fun and interactive tool integrated with the rest of Wayfair’s tools to run the retrospective ceremony.
What is the potential implementation costs?
We expect the cost to be around 1 week for a 4 engineers team excluding the analytics part.
Do you have any estimated impact metrics based on past collected metrics?
There are no metrics collected for retrospective meetings at the moment because there is no standard tool that has been used by all the teams in Wayfair so far. Also currently used tools like GDocs or FunRetro don't provide any insight about retrospective meetings to measure any impact.
What’s next?
The next steps are meeting with managers to see the possibility of deploying this tool at Wayfair and also get some support and guidance. Reserve some time to work on it so we can be able to improve the tool and then deploy it.
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