A Simple One Year

An eventful One Year. ? Started with clear mandate of accelerating the development.? Was blessed to have a great team to begin with, and we went all out in our Product Development.

Took steps in strengthening the Development and Release Process with Young and Growing Team.? To achieve the same we were all in on Agile; Sprint Planning done by every team, Quality, DevOps, Mobile FrontEnd, Vehicle Cluster and BackEnd Team. Sprint Completion Ratio being one of the key metrics to track our progress, which was incrementally set higher.? 100% Sprint completion is never ideal so is anything below 80%, we targeted a sweet spot of 90%-95% individually and as a team.? A healthy mix of aggressive and practical sprint load was always? the goal.

As we got better at it, it was time for me to grow the team, first step: Interns, our Simpleterns program onboarded students across multiple teams. We also had experienced hires, who now own and develop critical products.

The stages of team development (Tuckman’s stages of group development which my mentor had once introduced the concept to me) Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning, is what I could see first hand.? As more people came into the team, it was time to pause and do the cliched “team building activity”, but it was far from cliched.? Everybody knowing a bit more about each other and their perspective of work, team and personal goals, through this “team building activity” was crucial for my team to move forward faster and together.

Building a team is just one part, but the team to build a bond with one another is truly the epitome of a great team.? During the course of off-site we did engage in conversations which included retrospective into how we have performed as a team and our learnings for the future.

And this team continued to grow, with the first batch of Interns getting converted to Full Timers and being welcomed into Simple Energy Family, which was a mutual effort of the Interns and their Mentor.

We were developing solutions and solving problems across, Mobile, Cloud Applications, Front End Applications, Automation Solutions, DevOps, Vehicle Software, Data Analytics and improving our Processes as we set out to do at the beginning of my journey here. From solving scaling and setup issues with EMQx or building Mobile / Watch App or handling DevOps Team setting up Jenkins Build pipeline, the list goes on, each team continues to master their domain and contribute Cross Functionally ! And of course we made a choice to adopt Google Cloud, helped through their Startup Program.

And results, our products that we built and deployed over the past months...

And many more, as we grew larger and cross functional, it was time for us to re-group again and PI Plan with the other teams, be it Firmware, Hardware, Vehicle Dynamics Team or New Product Development Team ! And it couldn't have come at a better time to do than when I just completed an Year !

Taking multiple teams into Agile Release Train Thought Process was fruitful !

With Business Goals and Execution Plans set, I am trying to repeat my simple formula 3P's & T - People, Process, Product & Technology.

Last but not the least, making it a point enjoy with my team !

Great Year, and the Learning Never Stops !