LoyaltyLion Tech Summit Q1 ‘23
In February ’23 we held our first Tech Summit of the year. I wanted to share some insights in why these events are so fundamental to our engineering culture and what we get up to…
Why we hold Tech Summits
The Technology team at LoyaltyLion is remote-first — our teams are currently distributed across most countries of the UK plus mainland Europe.
This means we spend a bunch of time on Zoom and Slack 👩🏻💻. This works well, but there’s really no substitute for some good ‘ole face-to-face time, so several times per year we bring the whole team together in one location.
“The whole environment of working in person with colleagues rather than being in isolation or over Zoom was great 😃”
Our summits have a ‘work focus’ but we also make sure we take advantage of the opportunity for some (mandatory!) fun.
Day 1
Spaghetti & Marshmallows 🍭
We kicked off with an oldie-but-goodie; the Marshmallow Challenge, shuffling the teams and setting them a short (20 min) challenge to build the tallest structure possible using only:
Somewhat disappointingly, our engineers scored less well than the average for Nursery School children (this is apparently quite typical!). There’s actually a lesson here that relates to one of our core values:
Delivery over deliberation We act with a bias towards action. We find the fastest way to deliver impact and do it. We observe, learn and iterate. We do not seek perfection on day one. Instead we want fast continuous improvement. We believe there is more lost through indecision than wrong decision.
Studies have found that, rather than over-thinking the task, children are pretty effective at “fail fast, learn and move on” — a skill that translates well to Agile software engineering 🏃🏻♀️
The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team 🥊
This book is 20+ years old now but it still contains some great lessons on how to build high-performing teams and why doing so can be so uncomfortable at times 😦
We walked through (up?) the pyramid of dysfunctional behaviours to understand how every link in the chain is critical to the team being able to deliver results consistently.
We also learned the importance of not being the Colin Robinson, the Energy Vampire in team meetings (if you know, you know) 🔋🦇
Each engineering team then completed a self-assessment activity, scoring themselves using a questionnaire that assessed the team’s relative strengths and weakness in terms of Trust, (positive!) Conflict, Commitment, Accountability & Results. The teams then picked their ‘weakest link’ ⛓️ and discussed how they could improve their score going forwards 📈
We came away with some great ideas around; creating team charters; revamping the way we run certain ceremonies; ideas for better-focusing SCRUM teams around a single goal in order to ‘swarm’ more effectively on problems 🐝 and a great discussion on how clarity of expectations feeds into accountability 🙋♀️
Day 2
The Hackathon
We traditionally reserve a full day for our time-boxed Hackathon. Teams work intensively and collaboratively to pursue ideas based around a common theme. On this occasion we asked teams to consider the challenges our merchants are facing in light of the current economic climate and how LoyaltyLion can help their businesses through the tricky months ahead.
Teams include a wide range of roles/skillsets: engineers, application support engineers (ASEs), product managers, product designers, site reliability engineers (SREs) and other Technology roles.
The Hackathon starts with each team delivering the ‘Elevator Pitch’ for their idea, after which they spend the day ideating, designing, constructing a business case and (yes!) coding…usually right up to the wire ⌛ Each team then presents their outcomes to the group and a judging panel assesses them in terms of Potential Impact, Effective Collaboration and Execution.
“I liked the mindset of working collaboratively, coming together to focus for a few hours and getting something out there quickly without overthinking it too much…the general ‘lets just get something working’ attitude”
By a single-point margin, the judges’ favourite on this occasion was Team Merchant’s Pride for their end-to-end data pipeline which aggregated live transaction data and rendered merchant insights on a dashboard 🛠️📈 👏🏻
“I was impressed by the quality of the results… all the ideas were great!”
Whilst we don’t expect ‘production-ready’ code from a Hackathon, on this occasion the work of three teams (from four) has been adopted for product development and, in two cases, code is already released into Production 💪🏻 🚀
Swingers 🏌🏻♀️
The event ended with 9 holes of Crazy Golf in the shadow of London’s Gherkin building followed by frozen cocktails and street food 🍹🌯
In summary…
If your remote team has gotten out of the habit of having some quality F2F time together then we’d strongly recommend building something similar into your plans — it’s definitely something we’re committed to continuing for the LoyaltyLion Product & Technology team 🦁⚙️
