LoyaltyLion Prod & Tech Summit Q3 ‘23
Our Product & Engineering team has grown over the last 6 months and we are now distributed right the way across Europe from Northern Ireland to Bulgaria. As a remote-first team we really value our face-to-face time (as I discussed here), so we were excited to gather once again for our 2 day ‘Prod & Tech’ event.
We ‘prepend’ our Prod & Tech Summit onto LoyaltyLion’s Quarterly Review & Summer Party. This gives us a chance to, initially, focus on topics that are specifically relevant to our product teams and to foster the cross-fertilisation of ideas to build a high-performance culture. This is then followed by participation in company-wide activities which helps to develop relationships with our broader stakeholders and end users (ecommerce merchants).
Day 1
We always start with an icebreaker. This time, we mixed the teams up and set them the challenge of surviving a plane crash in the Sonoran Desert, ranking the items recovered from the fuselage into priority order and comparing their results - first as individuals and then as a team - to the ranking of a survival specialist 🏜
This exercise is fun but there’s (always!) method in the madness; in this case it was an opportunity to discuss the problems of Composition, Participation and Influence that determine whether a team enjoys process gains 📈 or instead suffers process losses 📉
Next up - and because we had so many new faces - our Chief Product Officer ran a session to remind us of our unique value proposition in the context of loyalty programs going back to their inception (in Ancient Egypt!). This helped us to re-enforce the “Why?” for both new joiners and longer-serving colleagues.
Then it was straight onto the main theme for the day — which was all about DATA. Firstly Alex, our Director of Data (sporting unquestionably the finest beard in LoyaltyLion🧔♂️🦁) walked us through the evolution of the Modern Data Stack and then introduced us to our visiting speaker for the day, Bruno Souze de Lima, who took us on a code dive into the capabilities of DBT.
We always seek to achieve a good balance of fun, talks and hands-on workshops at the Summit so, in the afternoon - after another group photo opportunity - it was time for everyone to get their sleeves rolled up and produce some data visualisations using Superset
Finally, to test whether all this ‘brain food’ had improved our cognitive abilities 🧠 we headed to a WWII Escape Room for beer, popcorn and puzzles 🍺🍿🪖🔓
Day 2
New theme today, as we dived into the topic of Empowered Product Teams, starting with a look at the work of Marty Cagan and his book Empowered.
We looked at the case for Empowered Product Teams - Intrinsic Motivation, Customer-centricity, Velocity and Innovation - and what distinguishes a ‘Delivery Team’ from a ‘Feature Team’ and a truly ‘Empowered Team’. We then spent some time looking at the anti-patterns so we can spot them if they rear their heads, including the Feature Factory and Waterscrum.
Next it was back to the team challenges, this time drawing from the world of data security. I am unable to tell you more about this exercise for reasons of, er, security 🥷
The summit concluded with a whole-of-team Retrospective in which we scored ourselves against the traits and behaviours of a high-performing Empowered Product Team, built a heat map of areas for improvement, then workshopped some approaches and experiments we could take forward into our future planning.
But, of course, the night was still young in Shoreditch so more shenanigans again ensued…
