2024 W25 - Quick Reaction Team

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

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We're testing a new super small team, starting with just one engineer. He's aided by one engineering manager and myself.

This new team is an experiment to try and react faster to feedback from Paid Users.

This is what you'll find in this team's watchlist. BTW, we use github projects to manage issues, and this is another project. Issues are shared between projects.

There are two important elements to the goal of this team (take opportunities faster).

• The Watchlist.

  • This is what the team will track (to follow up and learn).

  • Most will NOT be solved by the team's engineer. Because it's only 1 engineer, and because they are requests and bugs related to large projects whose expertise lies in a particular team.

  • You can see the categorization and real size of this backlog in the image.

  • 5 issues have been completed last week!

• The Work.

  • This is what the team will deliver.

  • On the categories, "Friction" includes small new features that are part of our roadmap but weren't top of the list. Like inserting a new YouTube block (not planned). Friction also includes improving content. Mostly, it means decluttering things that aren't needed anymore, or changing how they are understood by the user. Example: users didn't really get our 2 methods of updating tables, "Upsert vs. Refresh", so we cleared that and now we just call them "Log vs Replace". Plain language goes a long way.

  • Localization includes improving the job in Formats, Devices, Browsers etc. Example: maybe a paid user really depends on an unsupported Datetime format (year-week, or wwww-Www), and we have to deliver it!

  • It excludes requests and bugs related to ongoing projects of particular teams. For example, the ongoing support of existing Integrations and our Data Tables system, or the computation engine.

Having such a team isn't elegant, but it may be effective. One size fits all is too rigid.

The way I see it, it's not different from the different solutions that society creates for its problems. We use general practitioners and family doctors to keep track of our general health, clinics of specialists develop solutions to particular problems, but if urgent care is needed, you'll go to an Hospital/ Emergency or call an ambulance. There's even huge organizations to take care of breakout events like pandemics!

I'll report by end of quarter on progress.

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See you next week!

Humberto