This week we employed our async governance process to govern some important policy proposals.
When a Parabol team member wants to make a change to existing policies we use a consent-based decision process assisted by a Slackbot workflow (see below). There are four stages to the governance process:
- Tension background and proposal – a specific tension is identified and a proposal is presented.
- Clarifying questions – Team members can ask anything they like to gain a better understanding of the proposal.
- Reactions – Team members provide reactions to the proposal, amendments are made if necessary.
- Recording objections – a team member can object to the proposal if they believe it isn’t “safe to try”.
Our consent-based approach is designed to avoid delegated decisions where one person wields complete decision-making power.
Sometimes our asynchronous decision process proceeds smoothly with only a few questions or reactions and is adopted quickly. This week we had two decisions adopted relatively easily. We decided to add a new role to handle accounts receivable, and also to retire some of the Parabol logos to provide consistency in our external facing sources.
In other instances debate takes place. This is a feature and not a bug in the process. Our culture encourages transparency and openness. We want our ideas to be challenged and scrutinized. It’s important that everyone has a voice because delegated top-down decisions often lead to disastrous consequences.
After several weeks of back and forth, we concluded governance on our new pricing policy. It has gone through several rounds of amendments and clarifications. Subjecting the proposal to our governance process served to strengthen the final product. This week we were able to push it over the finish line and govern a policy that was deemed ‘safe-to-try’.
Metrics
Monthly new users visiting our website are up about 10%, total registered users and monthly active users are both up around 2%. New user signups have been supported by an increase in invited users, which are seeing an uptick this week. We’re tantalizingly close to 75k total registered users!
This week we…
…Published a new blog post on 8 Facilitator Pro-tips for Fun and Effective Sprint Retrospectives.
…shipped v5.21.0 into production. In this release, we have added new public retro templates, a UI button to expose the undo completed grouping phase functionality from last week, more sprint poker work (JIRA integration), and a friendlier UI for tasks without assignees.
…created a PR for the mock Sprint Poker estimate phase.
…continued work on wiring backend and frontend for Sprint Poker template editor. WIP demo gif below:
…completed the Jira integration for Scoping in Sprint Poker. When we release Sprint Poker, users will be able to import stories directly from Jira and push stories from Parabol to Jira.
Next week we’ll…
…release Sprint Poker work on template settings and a bug fix for deleted reflect prompts.
…continue work on adding functionality to create Jira issues from the Sprint Poker scope phase.
…wrap up Sprint #66. It will be a short week as we finish up the abbreviated sprint and take a long weekend to reflect prior to our upcoming all-team retreat, S.P.A. 16.
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