Spike Tickets, Secret to Effective Teams, Business Partnership Pyramid
Edition #11 - 3-2-1 Mondays
Hello 👋,
Welcome to the 3-2-1 Monday newsletter.
Every Monday morning, start your week with the following:
💡 3 short ideas about working with devs and product teams.
📰 Two articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
❓ One question for you to think about this week while working.
To receive articles like this, please subscribe to The SEO Sprint 👇.
Newsletter News
I will not be writing a Thursday essay once a week moving forward.
I’ll still write them “ad-hoc” when it makes sense. Instead, I want to pivot and focus on other formats of content and ideas.
For example, over the next few weeks, new episodes of the podcast will be published with interviews with SEO Product Managers and their experience working in product teams.
You’ll get 3-2-1 Mondays sent to your inbox every Monday morning to start your week with 3 new ideas, 2 articles and 1 question.
-
Adam
💡 3 Short Ideas
Short ideas on how to improve working with devs and product teams.
1) Spike Tickets
What happens when a ticket or issue can’t be estimated because it seems too complex?
A method to help explore the ticket or issue is a spike.
What is a spike?
A spike is a method that originated from Extreme Programming (XP) an agile methodology and is defined as:
“Create spike solutions to figure out answers to tough technical or design problems.” - Create a Spike Solution, Extreme Programming
The practice of using spikes is used by product and engineering teams as an exploration ticket to identify answers to complex problems.
From my experience, getting developers to actually get to the code as soon as possible is the best way to understand, analyse and estimate solutions to problems you’re trying to solve.
An exploration ticket is used by product and engineering teams in two common ways:
💾 New technology - Understand if a new piece of technology will help solve the problem.
🤘 Identify a solution - Analyse a problem and identify possible technical solutions.
Ecommerce Website Example
For example, let's say I was a technical SEO manager at a large ecommerce website and I wanted the team to implement hreflang tags. However, the website technology stack the company uses makes implementing these meta tags complex. This means that the hreflang tag ticket keeps being deprioritised in the backlog.
To help unblock this ticket, the technical SEO manager could ask the engineering and product teams to create a spike ticket. This would allow the developers time to investigate, analyse the problem and come up with possible solutions.
From there the technical SEO manager could work with the development team to identify feasible solutions based on the website technology stack.
A spike ticket is added to the backlog just like any user story or bug ticket and just like any ticket it needs to be estimable, demonstrable and has acceptance criteria.
⏳ Estimable: It must be time-boxed and estimated to fit into a sprint (max 1-2 days)
📝 Demonstrable: The output must be demonstrable to the team (usually a write-up)
⚖️ Decision: It must allow the team to have sufficient information to make a decision
✅ Criteria: It must have clear acceptance criteria (just like a user story)
Once the spike is completed by the developer the results are discussed with the team and the information should allow them to have enough information to move forward.
2) Effective Teams
In 2015 Google conducted a study, code-named Project Aristotle, on 180+ teams at the company to answer a simple question: What makes an effective team?
The answer surprised them.
They hypothesised that effective teams would comprise individuals with a perfect mix of skills. When they analysed the qualitative data, they discovered they had been dead wrong.
What they found was that:
“Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”
-Google Rework Study
The team that conducted the study found 5 key dynamics that make up an effective team:
🦺 Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
🕰️ Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
🗣️ Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
❤️ Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
📈 Impact of Work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
The study highlighted that the most important factor in creating effective teams is psychological safety. In other words, how much the team trusted each other.
I’ve written more details about building SEO and developer partnerships in the following newsletter 👇.
3) Business Partnership Pyramid
How can SEOs measure trust levels between development and product teams?
The Business Partnership Pyramid is a framework to help SEO teams measure the “trust” between themselves and the tech team.
The pyramid represents a hierarchy of trust. An SEO professional needs to work on moving up the pyramid gradually by proactively engaging with the development team. Each level of trust is built on top of the previous one.
As the trust between SEO and development teams grows, it powers collaboration and allows the SEO professional to get things done faster.
Business Partnership Pyramid: SEO & Dev Edition
The framework itself is broken down into six levels, which represent the amount of interaction between the SEO, product and development teams.
🏴☠️ No Trust: No interaction between the dev or SEO.
📶 Networking: The basic level of interaction with the dev and product team.
🛒 Transactional: SEO and technical teams interact but only to allocate tasks.
🧠 Credibility: SEOs proactively work with teams to add value.
🤝 Relationship: SEOs are asked to collaborate with teams on initiatives.
🚀 Partnership: SEOs are part of the day-to-day decisions within the team.
Business Partnership Pyramid: The 5 Layers
I’ve written more details about building SEO and developer partnerships in the following newsletter 👇.
📰 2 Articles to Explore
Articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
Lazy Developers or Poor Communication?
by Tom Osborn
“The majority of issues making our websites a poor substitute for what they could be boil down to communication between and within teams.”
Shipping Fast Changes Your Life ⚡
by LUCA ROSSI
“After surveying 2000+ companies between 2013 and 2017, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim proved that what separates elite engineering teams from average and poor ones, is mostly how fast and often they ship.”
❓ 1 Question For You
A question for you to think about this week while working.
How are you building trust between the SEO team and the development team?
How did I do this week?
If you enjoyed reading this article, then consider the following:
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