Transforming User Behavior for Transportation App, Bellhop
I’m excited to have collaborated with Bellhop, a transportation aggregator. We have enhanced various aspects of the product, including the product/design/engineering processes and the hiring of UI/UX designers. However, our most significant improvement has been switching from Kanban to Sprints. We recognized the frustrations that prompted this change: our production release cycles for iOS and Android were inconsistent. Several factors contributed to this issue, including having four offshore developers and a two-person management team in NYC, alongside previous pivots. Our Jira Kanban board was overwhelmed with over 150 incomplete and irrelevant tasks. Our weekly engineering meetings reflected this lack of direction, often resulting in discussions about competing priorities without a clear agenda, leading to "last minute" requests and updates by the end of our hour-long calls. Consequently, we launched our first sprint on January 22, 2020, just three weeks after I joined Bellhop. My top priority was to establish a solid understanding of the differences between Kanban and Agile, which influenced delivery dates for epics, story point estimations, and user story details. I created this presentation to support that effort: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sa1frMui5h4aMNrgx_v7sJKoC8zvJuEDbiFZKewvv_o/edit?usp=sharing. Then we kicked off Sprint 1! To set clear expectations, I informed the team that it would take about 5-6 sprints to overcome the forming/storming stage and to gauge how many story points our team could effectively handle in each two-week sprint.