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!!