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How Boby cultivates collaboration and innovation

By Jasmin Seren-Rosso, Managing Director & CPO @ Boby

Are silos a property inherent to large organizations? From prior experience, in such companies communication tends to be a side effect of Non Conformities being raised or includes higher-ups in the organizational chart. Let’s explore how a smaller company grew from nothing and avoided silos during its formative years.

Necessary context

The history of the company starts in 2022 with 8 people and an MVP delivered in 8 intense months of work. There a strong cohesion between development and product teams, probably thanks to the rush. One year later, the team doubled in size and the product was being sold to customers. The first negative comments ensued: sales did not understand the product roadmap, designers received features before they were fully fleshed out and there were quality issues here and there. The company being still young, something could still be done!

What has been done

To align the different teams on the customer objectives, regular continuous improvement sessions were set up. And from them emerged multiple decisions such as:

  1. Everybody does support! Following training, everybody learns to provide support to customers. There is still no team dedicated to customer support today and it still works. This provides a direct feedback source for product improvements!

  2. Everybody does product! Essentially, every individual has unique experiences giving them unique points of view. This necessitates the creation and maintenance of a second backlog but for ideas! This then translates into brainwriting sessions where sales remind the basics of their target customer persona such as their approach with digital services. The team thus learns to step into your customer’s vision of your product.

  3. Everything is meant to change, eventually. Everybody can challenge the status quo of the product and the organization through feedback sessions and by peering. Designers and product owners work together on features to ensure they understand them fully, then designers challenge each other on designs, submit them to developers which evaluate their feasibility and finally submit the completed feature to salesand marketing teams.

In this organization, the quality is a shared concern and there are many ways to push it like moving to a written culture. The current culture, built around change management, welcomes the contributions of every individual and values their uniqueness.

Questions and Answers

How to keep the cultural momentum after reaching critical mass?

Hard to say. For now, with 24 employees, the culture and practices hold. Time will tell, even though the organization will have to evolve at some point.

Are siloes and company size correlated?

No doubt that there’s some sort of relation between the two, but the issue might be rooted in how communication breaks down after too many actors.

Speech, such a fantastic tool at the tip of our tongues

By Geoffrey Graveaud, DevSecOps Lead & Coach

Words are used daily to express oneself, exchange, debate sometimes without measuring their impact. Precisely reproducing an idea is more complex than one can imagine. For instance, think of a dog and of how you would describe it to a diverse audience. Here are some tools that will help you in that regard:

  1. Silence
    Used gracefully, it makes speeches more impactful. People love stories and suspense. Add some breaks, let your words breathe and use it for emphase. Silence alone is not enough; use it with purpose. This is often the topic of manager training sessions, as silence is also a tool to get answers from others and to articulate one’s thoughts.

  2. Stylistic devices
    French has a wide collection of them, all fairly studied in literature classes. Use them at your advantage to sprinkle additional meaning to your discourse. You may use hyperbole to convey enthusiasm or exageration and anaphora to insist on a common link between multiple notions.

  3. Body language
    The body speaks as well. To capture attention from the audience, use your sight. Try to imagine a discussion partner whose eyes are drifting: are you still in a dialogue? Your sight maintains the attention of the audience and your intention.

Your arms and hands serve the coherence and harmony of your speech. Their posture and movements punctuate and add intention to your words. Try positioning your hands between your waist and your shoulders then form a triangle with your fingers, or point your index finger when talking in a rythm, or close your fists. Each position adds a different meaning.

The tools above were all used in the iconic “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King. It’s all about training.

Questions and Answers

What are some good books to learn more about speech?

  • Bien parler en public, Laura Sibony (link)
  • Porter sa voix - S’affirmer par la parole, Stéphane de Freitas, Gaëlle Rolin (link)
  • Le Pouvoir rhétorique, Clément Viktorovitch (link)
  • How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, Julian Treasure (link)
  • L’Atelier slam, Julien Barret, Lyor, Rouda (link)
  • TED Talks by Chris Anderson (link)

What is the source of the public speaking hobby?

The trigger was the frustration of not speaking like the other Devoxx 2015 speakers. Since then, Geoffrey has been learning and practicing public speaking.

What are some goot recommendations for the sight?

The recommendations vary depending the size of the audience, though it is generally recommended not to focus too much on the same point. Deviating from the audience for a brief moment is okay. Then there are strategies, like scanning in the shape of an “L” or a “W”.

Making a clean sweep of a scope when nobody asked for it

By Pierre Segalen, Mobile & Web Maker @ XII (twelve)

In 2015, in the “mobility” team of a large French e-commerce actor, a revolution was stirring. At the time, the team was small, comprised of one tech person, and two business and product owners, plus a tech lead / scrum master. The ecosystem was a monolithic ASP .NET service with native Android and iOS apps that were showing age, developed externally and with an API that was left to rot for three years. The situation was dire and things weren’t moving fast. Let’s see, month after month, how this team undertook a transformation that was not meant to be and changed their company for the better, durably.

In June of the same year, seeing the evolution of the market, something changed: six tech people, four business people, an ambitious roadmap, yat still an API that left a lot to be desired and complexity with maintaining the existing software legacy.

Then disaster struck in July: deep budget cuts. 45M€ had to be saved in six months and this meant freeing no less than 280 contractors. The offices were empty and the relation with the management were at a low. One month went by.

In August, the “mobility” team was looking for work to do, with no success. Redesigning the API was the only sensible thing to do, so it proceeded without formal validation from the top.

Comes September and another bad news struck: the budget cuts also affects the mobile apps maintenance. The “mobility” team had to learn about a dozen of technologies from the Android and Apple ecosystems to keep the apps from decaying. Or… they could implement a hybrid app that could work for both ecosystems using technologies like Cordova or Xamarin.

October 2015, and the tasks came back. Also with them a presentation of the API redesign effort, which was announced as 75% complete in just 90 days. The architects could not believe it and criticized the design decisions, even though the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and the project validated!

In December 2015, the release of React Native shook the tech world! Internally, it led to slides and meetings with the CIO. Risks were analyzed, insider information from the React Native team, return on investment and alternatives were considered. The truly convincing slide was the one that dived into three scenarios: no app redesign, separate native apps and React Native. Plus one more thing: introduce React on the web to unity the tech stack and create bridges across web and mobile teams. This sold it.

February 2016 saw the start of this effort. In the end, the old API and apps were decommissioned in a year. This change has endured the wrinkles of time.

Questions and Answers

In retrospect, how do you feel about the project?

Everything happened when we were young, and at the time we believed the hierarchy has full control over the destiny of their products. There was an opportunity, we learned to seize it by being bold and detaching from the grind.

What was the “return on investment” argument?

The points were taken from everything that was available to the development team. First and foremost, the app stores with their notes and comments, the bugs, spinners, general slowness and ever increasing time to add new features. These flaws were common knowledge.

Everything could have been redeveloped from scratch, in native app form. The ROI argument was the only option because the company had no choice but to comply, as competitors were already seeing 60% of their traffic coming from mobile devices.

Did you have any prior experience with big migrations?

A few yes, but none that required ths much practice or support. Migrating is not about a skill but rather a mindset of questioning oneself. The code alone cannot embody the context or migration opportunity, there must be business aspects to justify a migration.