Scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball

Season 1, Episode 10
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This is a special episode of the bol.com Techlab Podcast. It’s recorded on at our own Tech Conference the bol.com spaces summit. Directly after Jim gave his presentation about 'scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball' we interviewed him. We had a great presentation at Spaces Summit with the Title: “scary close to fully autonomous teams”.

What the episode covers

Within bol.com we strive for autonomous teams because we believe that we will go faster, are more agile and we have more fun. But it is also great to hear from people outside bol.com how they perceive this. So, we are happy to introduce our external guest to you. As he worked in bol.com for 5 years but went over to another company end 2018 he is the person to ask for reflection. Time to introduce him to you.

Please bear with us, we set-up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were on this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.

Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mailto: techlab@bol.com

Guests

Jim van der Waal; Product Manager at Onefootball in Berlin. Before that, he started as Information Analyst in 2014 at bol.com and built a broad experience in roles like Scrum Master, IT Project Manager and Product Owner – presented “Life at Onefootball: scary close to fully autonomous teams”.

Show notes

We discuss the move from Jim to Onefootball in Berlin and if he already feels included.

After this introduction, we dive into the why of autonomous teams at Onefootball. Jim explains which specialities/roles work together in the teams. Already at bol.com he was interested in the Lean Startup Principles and now he explains how we recognize these within Onefootball, already 200 people in total, 55 million downloads of the app and 11 million active customers worldwide.

We take some time to discuss and ask about the way of working. Several items during the presentation got our attention. Validating ideas, the discovery funnel, how people get emotionally attached to ideas, maintaining small backlogs and not spend time on investigation of 20-30 epics.

The way Onefootball deals with the fact that there are too many good ideas? Decide within the team.

A great one Jim explained: focus on output versus outcome. Output focused means, for instance, focusing on the story points, focusing on the outcome the customer value.

The setup of SRE is discussed.

Jim also discusses some themes like “the technical landscape shouldn’t describe your customer experience”.

Interested in the video of Jim's talk during spaces summit? Check here

Peter Brouwers

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Peter Paul van de Beek

All articles by me