Sprint 0 in action

A team of Minders recently travelled to La Tour-du-Pin in France (really close to Lyon) to meet with a client — Serge Ferrari — for a 3-day workshop otherwise known as Mindera’s Agile ‘Sprint 0’ process. We met with some of the team who are part of this product development to learn more about how this Sprint 0 went.

First things first, let us tell you a bit about our partner. Serge Ferrari specialises in developing, producing, and distributing high-performance composite materials. They are known for their innovative, flexible composite materials used in multiple industries, like architecture, outdoor furniture, solar protection, and more.

Serge Ferrari's products are recognized for their durability, lightness, and resistance to extreme weather conditions. Their materials are designed with environmental sustainability in mind, and they are committed to their corporate social responsibility.

The team on this project for this initial stage involved the account owner, product owner, two software engineers, two designers, and a consultant architecture engineer.

It was a very exciting trip with the chance for some of our global Minders to connect in person, having previously only met remotely. Being on-site allowed the team to look inside Serge Ferrari’s operations, which has been extremely useful for our team to deeply understand our client’s business and become a valuable partner.

The team and their roles

The Account Owner

The Account Owner for this project was Alexandra Bigotte de Almeida; her role in the 3-day workshop was to facilitate the sprint 0 process and provide expertise on brand architecture and marketing strategy.

Alex first engaged with our partner to understand what they needed in order to set up a sprint 0 with the right team for the project.

The Product Owner (PO)

The PO is in charge of the product requirements; they learn, deeply understand, and then own the problem that a user wants to solve. Their role also involves helping translate between business and technical requirements and ensuring communication stays fluid between project stakeholders and the development team.

The customer will discuss their requirements with the PO and the team while trying to communicate the problem they need to solve; our experts pick this apart and ask, "Well, hey, what about this angle? Did we consider this approach? What would be the impact of doing it like this?” and things continue from there.

In short, our POs help define the product we need to build, its scope and scale, get to know its users, and provide expert recommendations, being the main drivers of the Sprint 0 phase. The main outcome of Sprint 0 is a high-level plan with ideas of how we’re going to approach the problem and build the product, and some agreed ways of working for the team.

João Dessa is the expert PO on this case. We met with him to find more insight into his exciting role on this product. When talking about his role generally as a PO, João highlighted that:

“It's like going two steps back and trying to understand. Okay. But what are we solving here? What is this for? Will this be useful? Will this be too much? For the problem we have, will this be too little? And so that's one of the roles of the product owner, especially in sprint zeros or these kinds of workshops that we do at Mindera…

In a standard project, the role is to start raising scopes—for example, epics which are like these larger pieces of work that we will be delivering. Let's say for an e-commerce website, an epic could be cross-selling on the shopping cart; there will be several user stories within these epics. This would cater for small features that are in this scope. And then, we write the user stories and define them with the engineering team. The stories are framed to highlight the customer goals; for example, ‘as a marketing manager, I want to be able to cross-sell relevant products within the shopping cart so that I can increase the cart value for each customer’. In a nutshell, user stories introduce everyone to the main goals and help make an MVP.”

João and the team put this into practice for our client in La Tour-du-Pin. On the first day, our Minders visited the factories and saw the production lines of Serge Ferrari. This helped inform the team's knowledge of how the business works from the inside out so that we could be the best possible tech partner.

The initial product idea the team was asked to build raised some questions which could have been a risk to the success of the MVP. Minders being Minders, with their curious and inquiring minds, started picking the problem apart. The team then built on the initial idea, asked all the right questions and dived deep into the problem at hand and the business requirements. This led to a strong product pivot during the first workshop day. The team collaborated with the client together to steer the project in the best possible direction for the business, which unlocks additional value and acts as a stepping stone in a larger digital transformation.

The Software Engineers

To find out more about our Software Engineers in this 3-day workshop and product build, we spoke to Gonçalo Santos and Francisco Pinheiro. They gave us great insight into just what goes on behind the scenes.

Gonçalo discussed how:

“As frontend developers, we are quite used to understanding what people want to use a platform for. We are used to having different experiences and having opinions of our own. Of course, with some experience from past projects, we can ask some good questions, and that was the main role here.”

Francisco added to that with:

“We try to give our insight from our past experiences, and my work in Mindera has been essential working with e-commerce; this platform for the client was supposed to be more traditional e-commerce, but that evolved. So we really try to give our insight and see problems ahead of time, so we can propose different solutions and give a different view.”

The team did just that in La-Tour-du-Pin! With the evolved product vision in mind after the first day, they got to work, even enjoying discussions between Minders and the partner’s team well after the planned end of the day. It shows just how passionate we are about the work we do; passion doesn’t feel like work; it’s just what we love doing!

From our discussion with Francisco and Gonçalo, we got a picture of how our team skillfully partners with our clients by drawing on past experience. They highlighted how this was easier because everyone got together in the same room to run the workshop. Different offices and different teams met each other for the first time in person. As La-tour-du-Pin is a small commune, many places close after 7 pm, allowing for more bonding and brainstorming to continue well into the evenings.

One evening the team visited Lyon together with our partners’ team and got the chance to immerse into the very typical Lyon culture and cuisine. Some of the team members were courageous enough to try the traditional Andouillette delicacy for dinner. That definitely earned them respect from the locals!

We were told how useful and valuable it was to see the business in action by visiting the warehouse to truly place ourselves in the client's shoes. In addition, it gave the team plenty of ideas on how they could digitalise the solution.

The Designers

For a sneak peek into the design element of Mindera’s unique Sprint 0, we had a catch-up with Inês Margarido and Fábio Dias.

They walked us through the specifics of the design team in this Sprint 0 and also shared an insightful, step-by-step look into their processes (including a peek at the post-it note session and brainstorming.)

Inês and Fábio first discussed the Sprint 0 process. They echoed what some of the other team had told us about the usefulness of visiting the client’s facilities and seeing their products being made. This was helpful so the team could suggest and build on a new path - this idea was then born and worked on.

As Inês commented:

“For the first part, we went to Lyon. What we did there was mostly to understand the business. When we first got there, and after reading the briefing, we already had an idea of what the solution could be. Even though the conversations with some stakeholders were leading to that initial idea, we ended up noticing a different solution. Then that idea really cemented when we left Lyon and started the design sprint.”

On the design process, Fábio added:

“The design sprint is a workshop where some of the stakeholders and the team that are trying to solve the problem meet. It's starting to basically think of a solution. So, the first step of the design sprint is to frame the solution by interviewing the experts.

We take some post-its and imagine how we can solve the problem and what the platform features should be to solve it. We try to answer all these questions on the user flow map and design user personas around the product”.

Our expert designers then shared some examples of their processes in the sprints as well as a wireframe example (try to think of this as a foundation for an app or website; the barebones, stripped back)

Wireframe/design examples

Some Final Thoughts

To round up, you could say the trip to visit our partner for Sprint 0 was a success. The team took an in-person look at the product and the goals of Serge Ferrari, which helped in planning, iterating, and designing the initial MVP and product roadmap.

Pierre Boissonnet, Serge Ferrari’s Group CIO, shared that he has personally been very impressed with the team's business acumen and that it created a great relationship with the business, something that will be an asset in the next phases of our partnership. He gave us feedback that our engineering teams are not only challenging the technical aspects of a product, but also go deep into the business to understand what is the best product that can be built.

The La-Tour-Du-Pin trip has been the epic start of a great relationship between Serge Ferrari and Mindera, with the team working on developing this product to completion and helping with our partner’s goals for digital transformation.

Using our expertise to help people make their vision a reality is what we’re about at Mindera, and we can’t wait to see how else we can be of use to our partner in the future!

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