Example: Presenting the Journey

A Journey of Logic

Software Corp’s app development team consists of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Eve. They have agreed to start working with psychological safety, in the hopes that it can help their team grow and develop even better apps in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “Presenting the Journey”, and have decided to conduct it as a bi-weekly meeting, wherein two pre-selected team members present, rotating presenters for each meeting.

For the first meeting, Alice and Bob are presenting. Alice starts out, presenting a new filtering feature which she has been working on for a customer’s audio book application. She starts out by presenting the user story she is trying to solve, before showing the feature off in their testing environment. Alice then flips to a slide containing the three questions. She presents that her biggest challenge to overcome was trying to make multiple filters work at the same time, especially because the filters were of many different types. She shows code from a previous attempt at combining filters using some clever boolean logic, but shares that it ultimately became impossible to keep track of when adding new filtering options. She finally tried an inheritance-based solution with separate filter classes, and shows how easy it is to add new filters. Alice shares that her experience has re-inforced the notion that one should always try to consider potential future additions to the feature that you are currently working on, before writing the first line of code. After a few questions about Alice’s now working solution, Bob takes the floor for another round of “Presenting the Journey” in which he presents his challenges with overcoming an architectural bug that has been haunting the team for weeks!

Note: Spending your time constructively

“Presenting the Journey” is intended to be used as a team knowledge-sharing exercise, not as a status meeting. The motivation for the meeting should be for team members to learn from each other, based on the challenges that team members face individually, but might not get a chance to share elsewhere. If your team wants to do a full roundtable with every team member conducting a session of “Presenting the Journey”, in order to get a status update from everyone, consider whether it will be more useful for your team to either host “Presenting the Jouney” in a different meeting, having presenters present in sub-teams, or having only a few presenters conduct “Presenting the Journey”.