Summary
DevOps has spent a decade focused on tooling that allows developers to code, deploy, monitor, and optimize quickly and efficiently. Along the way, many within that community forget that the people within that community and the developers that they serve are, first and foremost, people. Hear what happens when a Design Ops professional finds herself embedded in a DevOps team, helps them see each other as people, and applies a bit of design thinking, tools and techniques to help them learn the skills necessary as the people they serve move from the information age to the conceptual age.
Key Insights
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The meaning of 'design' and 'We' can be highly ambiguous in companies like WeWork, requiring explicit grammar and syntax to clarify communication.
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WeWork operates at a rapid pace where a single day equals the typical volume of challenges faced in a week elsewhere, termed 'WeWork time'.
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Program managers at WeWork were often misunderstood, labeled as "expensive routers," missing the emotional intelligence and 'how' behind their work.
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Understanding people’s origin stories reveals their motivations and values, building deeper connections beyond what they do to why they do it.
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The Red Tech mission consisted of three waves of teams with differing backgrounds causing challenges in cohesion and emotional divides like fear and shame.
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A concise, fundamentals-first agile scrum training helped level up teams who were 'faking it,' leading to the emergence of #sharedunderstanding across disciplines.
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Quarterly retrospectives with defined ground rules and an emphasis on what improved over time enabled honest dialogue and team growth while maintaining privacy.
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Mapping individual user stories to OKRs and broader company goals enabled visibility into how multiple teams contribute in different ways, sparking inter-team collaboration.
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Small cultural rituals like Silver Heart Hat Awards build emotional connections and internal recognition crucial for team morale during rapid scaling.
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Finding or building a tribe, whether real or imagined, is critical for personal resilience and effective collaboration in environments of constant change.
Notable Quotes
"When you work for a company called WeWork, the word We can get really confusing and really, really muddy."
"WeWork time means the volume that others see in a week I confronted in a single day."
"One of our VPs said program managers are just expensive routers — that’s the what but they missed the how."
"Learning someone’s origin story lets you understand what means the most to them, not just the what but the why."
"Teams were faking it until they made it with scrum; they were using the right words but not the right practices."
"The quarterly retro’s last question—what started off poorly but improved—is where all the magic happened."
"What happens in retro stays in retro, creating a safe space for honest conversation and healthier teams."
"Adding OKRs to stories helped teams see how their work contributed to WeWork’s goals and discover overlaps with other teams."
"Silver Heart Hat Awards were a small thing, but everyone was so excited to celebrate their colleagues without question."
"Find the people with whom you can lock eyes—those are the people you need, your tribe."
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