Meeting Juan and Vulcan

About Juan???

Jack of all trades, master of none 

I love coding but more than that I love helping people grow 

Findmypast, TL 2015

Trainline, TL March 2018

Vulcan DM, May 2019

Not bad at...

- Caring about people

- Driven to outcome

- Love coaching people

Need to get better at...

- Say NO

- Critical thinking

My personal goals...

- Get better at managing a team of teams.
 

- Get all teams in Vulcan to be self-organized and highly-effective.

- So that I can get more involved in making Trainline even more awesome.

About Vulcan???

2016(~ish) Little team of people to work on performance marketing

2016(~ish) Little team of people to work on performance marketing

Paul Kiddie

David Houweling

Karen Martin

Tony Petrides

Performance marketing
Bring new customer to Trainline
Expand to new markets

2017

Two squads

Early 2018

4 squads:
EU
UK
ROW
Enablers

Mid 2018

First iteration of missions:

PPC EU
 PPC UK
Web2App
SEO EU
SEO UK
Enablers

Late 2018

Another iteration of missions:
 

Coverage
LP-CRO
Web2App
Wasabi
Core

Current

Mission teams + Core team

1) Coverage

Improving our rank and CTR will increase our presence and visits and hence will increase transactions in EU and UK.

Expand and attract to new channels, like affiliates.

Attract new markets, like new countries.

GOAL: Bring new customers by...

1) Coverage

PRODUCT: Sebastien de Bandt - Richard Keenan
DESIGN: Mat Cuz

Current structure (10)

Tech Lead: Luke Belfield
BA: Karen Martin (Principal)
Engineers (4):
   Tuffail Rahman (S)
   (Mindera)Carina Teixeira (M)
   Thiago Bordignon (M - New Joiner)
   Jeremy Le Francois (J)

1) Coverage

Doing great

- Great team environment and great individuals

- Great success with SEO.

- Work amazingly with stakeholders.

- Always willing to pivot and change.

- Good focus and ways of working.

1) Coverage

Challenges

- Many not full-time people (Seb, Karen, Richard)

- No one knows Google...

- Tech Lead a bit stretched

- Ideation process could improve

- From great user-story-delivery team to great user value delivery team

2) LP-CRO

Goal: Create an awesome experience for new customers that land in Trainline by...

5s TTI even for people with the slowest phones and connections.

Increase Step conversion to help with increase of NTS from <1% to 3.~ %

2) LP-CRO

PRODUCT: Raj
DESIGN: Mike Sizer

Current structure (11)

Tech Lead: Luca Colonello
BA: Bijal Patel (S - New joiner)
Engineers (7):
   Bill (S)
   Paul Turkson (M - New joiner)

   Phil Lee (M - New joiner in beginning Nov)
   (Mindera)Joao Silva ("S")
   (Mindera)Nelson Cardoso (M)

   (Mindera)New Joiner - Mid October (S)
   (Mindera)New Joiner - End October (J/M)
 

2) LP-CRO

Doing great

- Some great success with performance improvements.

- Technically really strong - Luca/Bill.

- Really confident with A/B testing and have achieved good cadence with that.

2) LP-CRO

Challenges

- Two different and very demanding goals, really important for the business (performance - conversion optimization).
- PaulG, used to be PO for Performance, really engaged with it.

- Two different POs caused friction for long time (two different streams -> one team -> change of focus)

- They haven't had a stable team for a long time.

- New members, some of them are remote.

- Sharing of knowledge, focus, AB Testing.

- Change of priorities is quite frequent.

- Learning curve for performance isn't easy, tooling, monitoring,...

3) Web2App

GOAL: Get people to engage with App by...

- Loads of tests in all the parts of the funnel.

- Improve UX from Web to App.

- Try new ways to engage new channels and new customers, eg. MentionMe, Button,...

3) Web2App

PRODUCT: Laura Sinclair
DESIGN: Mike Sizer

Current structure (9)

Tech Lead: Fernando Ferreira (Mindera)
PO: Gabrielle Geffroy
Engineers (5):
   (Mindera) Ricardo Pinheiro(S) --Web
   (Mindera) Jose Silva (S) --Web
   (Mindera) Miguel Coelho (M) --Web
   Emmanuel Unuigbe -- ios

   Jose Cortes -- Android

3) Web2App

Doing great

- High performing team that has achieved great success.
- Strong group of people, engineers, Gabrielle, Laura.

- Learned loads through AB testing.
- Good work with app devs.

3) Web2App

Challenges

- Collaboration between App - Web developers was not easy in the beginning.

- Touching many apps of Trainline.

- All Mindera web devs.

- Had concerns about Tech Lead, eg. managing web/app progress.

- Challenging to keep up to date from my side as it is very different to rest of Vulcan.

4) Core

GOAL: Make Vulcan an awesome place to be in by...

- Improving developers' productivity: remove tech debt, tooling, creating foundational work...
- Improve app reliability and confidence in deployments, cross-browser testing, dockerizing dev environments,...
- Support other teams with anything.

4) Core

GOAL: Make Vulcan an awesome place to be in by...

- Improving developers' productivity: remove tech debt, tooling, creating foundational work...
- Improve app reliability and confidence in deployments, cross-browser testing, dockerizing dev environments,...
- Support other teams with anything.

- Deliver Wasabi before end of year (renewal of sitespect)

4) Core

PRODUCT: Raj

Current structure (6)

BA: Bijal Patel (S - New joiner)

Engineers (4):
   Davo (PD)

   Tony Petrides (Devops -> Engineer)

   Panagiotis Smyrnis (M, Wasabi)
   Nathan Skinner (S, New Joiner)
 

4) Core

Done great

- Really effective and they have done loads for such a small team (2 people until recently).

- Davo's work is always great.
- Tony, Devops front was always amazing.
- Loads of flexibility to make great impact (sometimes flexibility led to problems...)

4) Core

Challenges

- Not a real team, in the process of changing. No retros, standups,...

- No tech lead, I was doing that role. Planning to get Nathan to take it.

- Raj's input is great but she mandates work to Davo directly without the awareness of the rest of the team.

- Too much change of focus and things in progress.

- Davo working remote can be challenging at times, although we make it work!
- Really small team and we have loads to do, tech debt, dependencies,...

4) Core

Challenges

- Deliver Wasabi to replace Sitespect!!