#353 – We Have a New Circle

This week we formed a new circle for our DevOps members and started to organize and set up various rituals around it.

Funny thing, the abbreviation DevOps is actually not meant to be a team, but rather a methodology. It came up a few years ago, describing the process to integrate the work of development teams and operations, focusing on a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility. That’s how Dev(elopment) and Op(operation)s came to be.

Nowadays, we use it to describe teams that work in the area of Developer Experience, Infrastructure, and Engineering Operations.

Up until a few weeks ago, we had two DevOps engineers, Aaron and Rafael, focusing on two different parts of Parabol’s offering: Public Sector and Private SaaS offering. While they have different requirements and need different kind of work, there is still an underlying foundation that both sides need to be working on – running Parabol’s infrastructure.

Two people doesn’t seem like a big team. Why the need to create a circle? Our other circles, like Product, Growth or Exco are rather big (in relation to our total team size). A circle isn’t necessary just a team. At Parabol, a circle also means to represent and own functions that relate to DevOps or any other functional role. Having a circle allows us to set up rituals and have a clear ownership separation.

So we went ahead and drafted up the idea for a new circle: detailing how this could work, what rituals we would set up, and how we would work together. After a short governance process, we had a new circle. And thinking that we only started with 2 DevOps engineers, we are soon going to be 4 people in this circle already. (One of those 4 is currently still being hired for, but that wraps up soon.)

The circle represents both sides that I mentioned, Public Sector and Private SaaS, but also our Developer Experience side. Matt, one of the co-founders and Principal engineers, is going to help out with any tasks or topics that span the whole of engineering and can unblock any infrastructure work.

At Parabol, we consider our DevOps circle a Platform team, working horizontally across the org, and helping out where needed.

The goal with the new circle is to align the work that is happening independently on both sides. That’s why we immediately set up a Github Projects board and a new check-in meeting every week for the team to chat.

It is going to be key to share work in progress and understand what everyone is working on, so that we:

Another ritual that we set up is, of course, our retro, so that the circle can continue to improve, and grow as different needs arise.

I am, personally, excited to have this set up now and to see how the circle integrates itself more and more into our company. Maybe I am a big fan of organizing things, but I guess that is ultimately for the better 😉.

This week, our metrics are green across the board – with a 13% rise in weekly meetings.

…are moving our new strategy for this trimester through our governance. Which we’ll likely start adapting next week.

…shared an update on a few role updates and moves in the teams. In preparation of the new strategy a few team members have adapted their roles and either moves squads or to a new circle.

…thing we are looking at data to see how our new Activity Library is performing. And it is looks promising so far 🙌.

…hopefully make an offer to one of the DevOps engineers we had in our BP process. Looking forward to bringing them onboard into our new circle.