Production and Scalability: How is the EGO community organized?

As we tell you in this article,  EGO had a recent renewal that fills us with pride. This process not only impacted outwardly, but also involved great changes indoors. Today we want to tell you a little more about that change, our ‘intimacy’. How is the EGO community organized? How is the production team managed?

As the saying goes: To understand the present, it is important to know the past: Let´s start by there.

How were things before

The EGO structure used to be made up of teams of different disciplines (Project Management, Development, UX, UI, etc.), and each of them was led by responsible figures: leaders.

These leaders had the responsibility of setting the quality standard and supervising the production of each person in their team, knowing the context of each project and client in order to guide and advise in an indicated way in each case.

What does this mean? That if a team had ten people assigned to different projects, the leader had to be able to cover those ten projects, guiding and supervising the production of those 10 people. That sounds a bit ambitious, doesn't it?

As we grew, we noticed that this structure was too small for us. That's when the need arose to design a scalable structure.

Easy now, you brain: What does scalable mean?

According to our friend Wikipedia, Scalability is the desirable property of a system, a network or a process, which indicates its ability to react and adapt without losing quality, or handle the continuous growth of work in a fluid way, or to be prepared to become bigger without losing quality in the services offered.

While scalability is an important point, this wasn't our only goal. We took this opportunity to look ahead and ask ourselves: where do we want to go?

That is how we defined that for the new structure we want:

• To avoid people's burnout: we learned that jumping from one product to    another on a daily basis can be exhausting.
• That people get fully involved in a project and focus on it. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ as the saying goes.
• Clear roles in projects: it is essential that everyone involved knows what the responsibilities and tasks of all parties are.
• A more horizontal organization: we seek to make leadership roles achievable for all people in the EGO community.

Jumping into the present

All that said, let's move on to explain the change: EGO is now organized in teams by projects rather than disciplines. Each project team is independent, with its own work methodology and roles assigned precisely to perform in a given client account.

Each team has technical referents assigned specifically to the project in question: we call this new role Adviser. The role of an Adviser takes on most of the responsibilities that the figure of the leader used to have: a profile in charge of guiding and advising in one or more projects on his specific specialty. The big difference is that we can now assign this role to different people in our community, without all the responsibility falling on one person per discipline.

Another new role that we started to implement in this change is that of the Project Owner (PO). This is the profile responsible for carrying out the assigned project and the decisions made during it. The role of a PO can be assigned to designers, developers or PMs: this will depend on the requirements of each project. Some projects require that they be carried out by someone who can have a direct contact on technical issues with our client - be it a developer or a designer- while other projects require the ownership of a figure who has a more general vision from beginning to end (PM).

But this is not all: in this transformation, we didn´t want to lose certain ceremonies or practices that occurred between the teams by specialty/discipline, which encourage learning, sharing and continuing to build the EGO culture. This is how the Communities cropped up: they are parallel spaces to the production teams, which serve to exchange both experiences and knowledge, and have periodic meetings organized by the Culture area.

And as people also form bonds through the interests we share, the Plazas appeared: thematic spaces open to all communities, where we gather around a common interest. Some of the squares we have in Discord are hashtag#Foodies, hashtag#Pets, hashtag#Accessibility, hashtag#Books, hashtag#Music and hashtag#sustainability, among several others.S

As a closure

In the few months that we have been implementing this new structure, we have already detected positive results: we have a weekly meeting that we call Follow-up, where each PO reports on the status of his team which allows management to get a clear view of the general status of production. In addition, the autonomy of each team improved, there is more clarity and transparency in the roles, and above all: those people who began to fulfill a leadership role for the first time, such as the PO´s, are enthusiastic about being able to be the ones who take the wheel to achieve the objectives of their project.

Maybe someone from the outside will read this post and say to himself: "In my team we have been working with a similar structure for a while now... 🤷". That's great! We know that this scheme is nothing new and in fact, we believe that we still have much to improve and continue learning. From here we are humbly transmitting our process of growth, our learning, our rebirth: that is what we want to share with the world.

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