Why product allows company to make better use of its teams while giving clients a transparent idea of what to expect
Transparency is vital to building trust with clients and, for Croesus, its Agility program is integral in providing them with clear information about what has been worked on.
The Agility program is a method of streamlining the best ideas to the top. It allows for a company such as Croesus to move away from the traditional pyramid-style structure to more of a circular organizational chart, where all employees can present their ideas on an equal playing field, thus making it easier to allow the best idea to emerge.
Guillaume Girard, Vice-President of Software Engineering at Croesus, said Agility allows his company to demonstrate the path each product has taken to its clients, thus showing what was done to get it to where it is today. By doing this, they are able to show what is currently happening and can then prioritize the next steps.
With Agility, Croesus is able to better define what they’re going to do, thereby allowing the client to better understand what the future of their investment is. But they also use a method called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), which allows them to prioritize by weighing the time a project will take against how much value it will bring to its users.
“If a product has a lot of high value evolutions, and we want to divert them faster because the WSJF number is very high, we should increase our investment in the product, which results in more people working on the product,” he explained.
They can then secure the client’s objectives and scale them based on the client’s needs, as well as the amount of money the client wants invested in the product.
“It’s not easy because when you move from project to product, it needs to be very clear, and you cannot say this is more important than this, or this is more important than that. If you build houses and you have three clients who give you their money to build their house, at the end of the day you can’t just build one super house … you have to build the three houses as expected,” he explained.
Croesus implements Agility inspired by the Agnostic Agile Working Method, which is a movement that first emerged in 2018, according to Girard. He said this allows each company who uses it to implement what makes sense for them, and what adds the most value for the company.
They’ve been able to implement the Agile methodology across multiple departments, he explained. This includes development, infrastructure, documentation, and more. “Everything will be Agile at the end.”
Overall, the key to Agility is to make sure the best ideas are always coming forward, resulting in an increase to transparency. With this, Girard said they will be able to adapt and inspect each issue properly, they’ll do it together, and instead of taking several months, it will take three weeks to fix most problems.
“Agility gives us the ability to always work on what makes the most sense, and creates the most value in our ecosystem. That’s why we’re doing this,” said Girard.
Agility also allows Croesus to create what Girard calls a “self-organized team.”
“The team knows what it has in the pipeline, and we’re going to work the idea that makes most sense, but we’re going to deliver it in the way we think it should be done,” he said. “This method creates a self-organized team with people that are now problem solvers compared to employees which simply execute tasks.”
In the end, by using this process, Croesus is able to present a product that makes the most sense, and provides the most value to the client. To find out more about Croesus and Agility, visit https://www.croesus.com/an-agile-response-to-crisis-management/
