CapitolAI Project teams

Overview

The Project team structure is a new approach to feature development and project management at Capitol. The idea is to assign responsibility for named major feature/features (E.g.projects, tweetstorms) to a senior team member, who then leads a cross-functional team to build this big feature. (E.g. Projects will be lead by Masha, who then is responsible for project management of that project including coordinating communications, defining deadlines, creating and tracking tickets in github, maintaining project board, and reporting on progress.)

The goal is to enable better planning, faster speed, more accountability, and cross-functional collaboration while maintaining dev roles.

Eventually, we will have non-senior team member lead smaller scale projects for them to practice project management and increase ownership in the product.

Why

Lots of the feature work at Capitol has suffered from under planning and lack of communication, individual teams have worked on their part of features but deadlines have not always aligned and there is often a lack of understanding of who is doing what and when and what is required as far as interfaces between FE and Backend. E.g. we kicked off tweetstorms a week before we are trying to deliver it. Under this plan we would assign responsibility and kickoff the feature even if we don't start dev work immediately, as close to having the feature locked in from a design / product perspective as possible.

Benefits

• Better planning & clear expecations about the feature to release
• Encourages personal investment/ownership in features
• Fosters a company culture as we grow and onboard more talent
• Better communciation - Promotes cross-functional collaboration and understanding
• Faster decision-making and issue resolution
• Faster delivery

Responsibilities of Project Owners. Order of Opperations:

1. Design / Product Consensus: Comprehend agreed-upon designs and clarify all feature aspects with product/design teams before kickoff.
2. Kickoff Meeting: Organize and lead a kickoff meeting as soon as possible after Consensus, inviting relevant engineering staff. The design will be shown to engineers, who will then discuss the technical lift, and raise any concerns (this can result to tweaks in designs due to techincal limitation, etc.)
3. Project Planning: Develop a comprehensive plan including interfaces, contracts, roadmap, and deadlines.
   • Leverage tools like Whimsical, lucidchart for diagrams whenever possible.
   • Make contracts and relevant details publicly accessible to all team members via google docs and github issues.
4. Task Management: Create a GitHub project board and generate necessary tickets. All teams should be using the same github board, which will better facilitate collaboration and tracking across functions.
5. Team Formation: Collaborate with team leads (frontend, backend, data) to select team members for the feature.
6. Reporting: Provide weekly project status reports.
7. Team Coordination: Organize project standups at least every other day.

Key Principles

1. Rotating Leadership: Team members take turns leading projects while maintaining their IC roles.
2. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Project Owners build and lead teams across different specialties (frontend, backend, data).
3. Accountability: Project Owners are responsible for feature delivery within set deadlines.
4. Personal Investment: By leading a project, team members become personally invested in its success.
5. Goal is to have 3/4 overall capitol team on feature work and 1/4 team supporting prod on ongoing basis.