# Season 2 Proposal

This is a proposal on June ‘25 to change some of the foundational ways of working that the Data Team agreed around May ‘24. We call this second year of the team the Season 2.

# Motivation

About a year ago, we started rolling as a team. It was a time of uncertainty and new beginnings. 

After an initial effort to define some constraints on how we wanted to work, and with some months of rolling together, we cam to find our own way of doing things. Just like the milky way went from a clump of shapeless gas and dust to a bunch of solid objects, we went from unorganized capital into a well oiled team.

Our ways of working that we designed and polished since then have served us well… **but today we’re in a Truvi that is not in like the Superhog we were born in!**

Since we started out as a team, many things have changed. Our colleagues have changed. Our customers have changed. Our systems have changed. We’ve probably changed too. This being the case, I thought to myself it made sense to look back at how we’re doing things with some critical eye to try to adapt to where we are today.

Finally, there’s a second reason I think it’s healthy to propose the changes you’ll see below: any pattern, repeated enough times, becomes boring and dull. One can only take so much of doing the same motions over and over again before becoming desensitized of it. I believing mixing things up and trying to get the same output with a different approach will help in keeping us entertained and engaged.

# What remains unchanged

Even though I will propose a few changes, I believe some of the things we do are just perfectly fine how we are and I see little value in changing them. Since you’re familiar with them, I won’t describe them much and just list them out:

- Using Kanban to track work
- Running our monthly team retros
- The figure of the Data Captain as the colleague responsible for triaging requests and running weekly tasks
    - Triaging Data Requests stays as is
- Having Uri and Pablo manage the interaction with the wider org.

# What I propose we change

- Formalize more Data Captain
    - Testing Data Alerts
        - Triage (check what happened)
        - Send to “owner”
    - Outage Data Alerts
        - Non-data-captain, all hands decks
    - Data News
        - Sending
        - Not writing all updates
    - Send targets
    - PBI Access requests
- More async
    - Harder push for docs
    - Use board as regular log for work
        - Standards
            - When creating
                - Context (why is this ticket here)
                - Related docs, links, etc.
                - Acceptance criteria (what is the DoD)
            - When working
                - Log steps as we progress
                - Keep in the right lane in the board
            - When closing
                - Final notes with outcomes + links to docs/PRs/relevant thingies
            - Always keep in the right epic. If no epic, unplanned.
    - Written-standup
        - Every day before 10AM.
        - Dedicated slack channel
        - Template
            - Yesterday I …
            - Today I will …
            - I’m blocked/Need a hand with…
    - Replace dailies with weeklies
        - After sync with Matt on Wednesdays
        - Quick summary of previous weeks
        - Offtopic-ish
        - Break
        - Planning (trying to commit to certain scope)
        - 90 min with break?
    - Harder enforcement of quiet days (Tuesdays and Thursdays for sure. Also Fridays?)
        - Internally
        - And externally
        - Reversely, we should agree to surrender Wednesday and Monday as meeting days.
- More independence in the team for setting tasks
    - Epics¿?
    - Quarterly goals, people can craft their own tasks in alignment with that

# Next steps

- [ ]  Improve UX on testing alerts (send reports with alert)
- [x]  Document board usage standards
- [x]  Document written standup standards and create slack channel and share template
- [x]  Document weeklies + set them up + destroy dailies
- [ ]  Plan Q3 priorities list + epics set up