#ToggleTalk: Workflows and Team Handoffs

Recap

This week, Toggle and I worked on mailing out stickers to our far-flung friends while we did ToggleTalk.

We picked the theme of this ToggleTalk because we knew about our BIG PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT on Thursday. I know that people making software always have some pain getting a task or story from one part of the organization to the next. We sometimes talk like DevOps is going to fix that, but it's not, really. Process isn't something we can fix with a tool, but a tool can help us build and use good process and see the problems when we have bad process.

LaunchDarkly was born as a developer tool, but as we get woven into more of the software development lifecycle, we're excited to give teams across the company the ability to control feature behavior. So for ToggleTalk, we asked our twitter people about their handoff experiences.

Questions

It’s time for #ToggleTalk!

Today we’re going to talk about handoffs between teams, and how they work for you.

🐣 How do tasks get started?
👑 Who is in charge of a task’s whole life?
🤖 Is your handoff process automated?
👻 Do you ever have problems with stuff getting lost?

🧵 pic.twitter.com/p9BXEwd3fd

— Heidi, The Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret ) May 13, 2020

We asked how tasks get started, who is in charge of the lifecycle, how handoff works, and whether tasks get lost in the middle.

Themes

The themes that we saw confirmed our hunch that handoff is the place where there is the most trouble for a task.

🐣 usually I make stuff up and put it in JIRA
🎂 yeah, I think no one is
🤖 I don't even know what an automated process would look like? But then again, I try to avoid JIRA as much as possible. :)
👻Stuff gets lost! Handing off tasks is a great way for them to never get done

— Cupcake ✨ 🧁 (@chris_swenson) May 13, 2020

🐣 starting team is usually either the stakeholder or whichever team has more capacity
👑 same as above!
👻 stuff gets lost allllll the time! which is probably why I noticed the "stakeholder" vs "has capacity" split. stakeholders would lose track of stuff all the time.

— lynn (they) (@lynncyrin ) May 13, 2020

I also got a DM comment that I will not embed that said,

"We are so bad at handoffs between teams that sometimes it is faster for me to learn their stack and do the work myself, rather than request it."

And then there's the problem of things dying in queue, or at least being indefinitely stalled:

Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
I once worked for company which always had FAR too many projects in play. They'd get >50% done (maybe 80-90%) then land on a team's huge backlog, or assigned to an IC who has a billion tasks. And then they'd be forgotten.#ToggleTalk https://t.co/TXJAdot6Ua

— Yoz Grahame (@yoz ) May 13, 2020

Jennifer Davis (@sigje ) had a great thread about the difference between an automated workflow process and an actual handoff, and what the difference means.

all the meta around work influences and directs the work we do. when we start devopsing the processes it can lead to more clarity and communication that helps the organization as teams stop acting as isolated islands. #ToggleTalk

— Jennifer Davis (@sigje ) May 13, 2020

Three different people identified "moving tasks from one team to another" or "managing stakeholders" as a part of what "management" does.

There is a popular misconception that "cross-team process" may be a managers problem, but I'd like to think there may be a better way. We want teams to get tasks/features that are well-scoped and have a good exit criteria, so no one has to spend much time on "what happens next". That's what a lot of pipeline/workflow software is trying to do. LaunchDarkly's new Feature Workflows doesn't drive the process, but it does support it. Now that you have the power to set expiration on flags, ingest metrics to change flag behavior, and delegate choices about flag behavior, we can slot into your processes even better.

Summary

Cross-team handoff is a hard, unsolved problem, but we can work on it with tools, processes, and goodwill. Not having to cycle back to a team to get them to activate something that has been approved will help, as will automating as much feature rollout as possible (with guardrails).

If you didn't get a chance to contribute to this week's ToggleTalk, feel free to comment here! Keep an eye out for next week, when we'll be talking about hiring!

If you're looking for more in-depth information on handoffs between teams and how to think about your whole workflow, process, I highly recommend Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis.