Crafting quality together
At HubSpot, product teams are small and autonomous which results in tight-knit cross-functional partnerships. After working with the same Engineers, Product Managers, and Product Designers for years, you have a shared understanding of what quality means for each member of the team, what they care about, and the responsibilities they manage. It comes from working through tough problems together—understanding use cases, personas, jobs to be done, technical and sometimes legal constraints. For my team, we had a shared understanding of what quality meant to us, but after a couple of team members left, it felt like we had a new team that no longer had the shared understanding we once did.
As a result, we dropped the ball on a few projects and our quality assurance wasn’t the same as it used to be. It leads to miscommunications and conversations with statements like “I didn’t know I was responsible for that” or “ I assumed that you did X, Y & Z”. Some members of the team felt like they had to work more or double-check to make sure everything was ready to be shipped. I knew it was important that the team took a step back to reset and align on what quality meant to us as a team.
I crafted a workshop to help the team develop a shared understanding of what everyone’s role was and what we need to do in order to feel like we’re delivering quality every time we ship something. After running the workshop, my team felt aligned on what everyone’s responsibilities were and they were excited to try out the new process we outlined.
Below I’ve shared how you can facilitate a quality workshop to help align your team--whether you’re a newly established team or you’ve been working together for a long time, taking a step back can offer reflection and clarity to help improve your team’s process.
What is Quality?
Before I dive into how to run the workshop, let’s level set on what quality means. According to the Webster dictionary, quality is the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something. If we think about that in the context of HubSpot, it’s about providing our customers who rely on our tools every day with the Minimum Lovable Product (read more about M.L.P here) not just the Minimum Viable Product. We as HubSpotters and Technologists must balance what is quick to ship vs. what our customers truly want and need. It also means ensuring quality assurance is done inclusively and is accessible for all users engaging with our products.
How to prepare for the workshop 📝
Workshop Miro board template
The workshop is broken into three parts. The first part is defining what quality means to the team. The second part is then aligning on what the responsibilities are for each discipline in the team. Finally, everyone works together to outline their ideal process for working together. This workshop can be easily facilitated in a number of ways, including remotely on a digital whiteboard like Invision’s Freehand or a Miro board. Before the workshop, spend a bit of time prepping the whiteboard. I broke my whiteboard into three sections, one for each of the parts of the workshop.
Timing ⏰
When I ran this workshop with my team I broke it up into two 1 hour-long sessions because I wanted to make sure we had enough time to dig into each part of the workshop.
After we completed both parts of the workshop we all worked together to finalize our process we outlined during the workshop.
Workshop Agenda 🗓
Intro (5 mins)
Part 1- Defining Quality (15 mins)
Part 2- Defining Ownership (20mins)
Part 3- Defining Process (20 mins)
Part 1- Defining Quality
For the first part of the workshop have everyone spend a few minutes reflecting on a few recent projects that the team has shipped (If your team runs regular retros, this is a nice follow-up activity after the most recent retro). To start, ask participants to spend 5-10 minutes reflecting on those recent projects. Ask everyone to jot down some points about what went well and what could have gone better.
Next, have participants list out the types of tasks that need to happen to ensure a quality release happens. You can give participants 10-15 minutes to list out all the tasks. After everyone is done, take some time to group similar tasks together and add any additional tasks that were overlooked. Next, give everyone a couple more minutes to brainstorm answers for the following questions “What are some quality pitfalls” and “How do we know we’re done?” After everyone has had time to answer, you again can group together similar themes. Here as a group, you can see the types of things that the team cares about. You can use these themes later when you’re outlining the team’s principles & process later in the workshop.
Part 2- Defining ownership
For the second part of the workshop draw a large Venn diagram either on the digital or physical whiteboard you’re using. Title each circle with one of the three disciplines that make up the team:
Next, give the team at least 20 minutes to write out all the tasks that they’re responsible for when working on a project. After everyone is finished, go around to each discipline and walk through what responsibilities and tasks they feel responsible for vs what they believe are shared responsibilities. Pull in any of the themes that might be missing from Part 1 of the workshop.
This part of the workshop for my team was eye-opening. Some newer members of the team didn’t realize the amount of cross-team / cross-product collaboration it takes to get a feature released for our product. It was also great to have a discussion around what shared responsibilities everyone thought we should have, what types of information should be shared with the team. It gave us an opportunity to reflect on our own today and how we might improve our process to deliver better products.
Part 3 - Defining Process
The final part of this workshop is defining the team’s principles and process. You should be able to pull the uncovered themes from the first part of the workshop to help you get started. Have a group discussion around what things the team should care about and things that they want to start caring about. Give team members 10-15 minutes to ideate on the discussion points. After everyone has contributed, begin to discuss which principles are the most important to the team and generate a list from the ideas. Once you feel good about the list of principles you can either set the principles aside to finalize later or take the time to finalize the principles with the team.
How do we want to achieve quality?
After you have a finalized list of principles, move on to discussing as a group what your development process should be. Have team members move at a good pace to make sure that the whole process is outlined. If someone disagrees with a task or step, mark it to discuss in more detail later. Once the team feels good about the outlined process, the facilitator can take it to transfer into a living document that can be put in a visible team space.
If your team is not ready to define their process, this is a good time to work on team principles or a team mission statement.
Reflection
It’s important to have the team reflect on the process and principles established during this workshop. My team runs a monthly retro so we can discuss any points in the process that are working well or are not working well. It’s an opportunity for us to reflect on the progress we’ve made and how we can continue to improve to achieve more. Feel free to use the same digital whiteboard as a place to keep track of monthly retros or you can use a tool like FunRetro.com.