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Pick the Fun Way!
How we turned around
the “worst” project
Melika Nafarieh & Martin Chesbrough
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Our Challenge …
Make it Fun!
How do you turn around a project with no apparent business value, misaligned stakeholders,
years of neglected complexity and trust gone missing ?
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This Is What We Want
01 THE TECHNICAL RFP
List of source systems
- Stripe
- Zuora
- RevCat
- Google Ads
- Meta Ads
- Bing
- TikTok
- Homegrown
systems
Technical Architecture
- Master Data
Management
- Star Schema
Technical Components
- BigQuery
- Airflow
- Dbt
- Looker
JUST DO IT!
We seem to be missing the Business Value?
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Discovering A Shocking Scope
02 ONCE WE STARTED
Complexity
we found
We had a mountain to
Complexity
we expected
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Don’t Demo without
Approval
03 THE NEXT SHOCK
● We wanted feedback
● So we decided to demo
what we had done … early
● We surfaced problems
● Which is NOT what our
stakeholders wanted!
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Perfect On The First Try
04 THE BLOW UP
● Need for perfection = BIG design upfront
● Low levels of trust
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Need a Predictive Plan to Build Trust
05 CHANGE TACTICS
● A thorough
timelines with task
and release plans
● Not fun but helped
build trust!
There is NO
change without
trust …
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06 MAKING A CHOICE
Delivering First, Then Iterating
● Gained trust through planning and delivery
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● Fun and creative retros
● Use fun to foster openness and encourage
honest, comfortable team discussions
07 PICKING THE FUN WAY
Creating A Safe Space
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● Our data problem was a value stream …
from source systems to marketing
dashboards
● Workshops with sales and marketing to
understand the flow of data from
end-to-end
08 CONNECTING ACROSS THE LARGER TEAM
Involving Marketing In The Process
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One Cross-Functional Team where we understand our
INTER-DEPENDENCIES
09 CREATING ONE FUN VIRTUAL TEAM
Creating a Cross-Functional Team
Weekly marketing
meetings to find data
reporting issues
Weekly governance
meetings to diagnose
the problems
Daily (larger) team
meetings to clarify and
fix the reporting issues
Weekly infra meetings
to fix the data sourcing
issues
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This is what FUN looks like …
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“This project has fundamentally
changed the way our organisation
thinks about and uses data
- Customer CTO
”