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The Practice Playbook
How do you run a practice at Artsy?

Practice Playbook

Establish Goals For The Practice

  • It should be clear why the practice is meeting and why it is a good use of time
    • Is there a cross team concern that needs alignment?
    • What does the future of Artsy's stack look like from the perspective of the practice? Is this practice how we get there?
  • It is ok (and maybe even preferred) for these goals to be short and concrete. Later on, the practice's goals may evolve into a technical vision/roadmap.

Create A Landing Page In Notion

This represents a single source of truth for the practice group.

Create A Meeting Agenda

Creating an agenda will keep the practice grounded and consistent. An example agenda might be:

  1. Ask who is taking notes for this meeting?
  2. Ask for updates on any action items from previous meetings
  3. Go over any metrics related to the practice
  4. Ask for updates from any working groups or tasks forces that have overlapping concerns with the practice.
  5. Decide on a topic for the next practice meeting
  6. Discuss this week topic(s)

Create Backlog Of Topics

Practice members should be encouraged to add ideas and topics to the backlog. It's important to note that a member doesn't have to be the expert to request a topic to be presented. Practices can be another venue for knowledge sharing at Artsy.

Store these topics in a table on the practice's Notion page.

Create Template Or Playbook For Discussion Topics

It is useful for discussion topics to have the following:

  1. Title: a few words describing the topic
  2. Champion: a designated person driving the discussion, doesn't have to be the expert here!
  3. Type of discussion: tech plan review, brainstorm, knowledge share, etc
  4. Goal of discussion: what questions should be answered? what kind of feedback does the champion hope to get?

See the Platform Practice's Discussion Topic Playbook

Create Jira Board To Track Action Items

Action items from the practice meeting should be tracked on product teams' projects but visible in one aggregated board. The practice should not have a separate Jira project to track work. Action items from practices should ideally be folded into a normal sprint on a product team.

  • Create a new label to mark tickets as related to the practice (for example, platform-practice)
  • Create a saved filter query that filters on that label
  • Create a new board in an existing project (choose the most relevant)
  • Change the board settings to use the saved filter query you created above

The board should be able to show tickets from other projects but with the practice label.

See the Platform Practice's Kanban Board

Running The Practice Meeting

The facilitator of the practice meeting should go over the agenda. Afterwards,whoever is championing the topic at hand should drive the discussion.

Stop often to give space for questions. It is important that members are given the opportunity to give input.

And remember, facilitating the meeting takes energy, but the energy that you put into it is the energy that you'll get back. Be excited about the things you're talking about and people will get excited for you!

Signal Boost The Topics

Announce at Monday's engineering standup what the practice will be discussing that week. If there is no topic, consider canceling the meeting.

Set expectations on who should attend the meeting. Ideally, there should be at least one person from each product team attending each practice so there is cross team knowledge sharing. However, sometimes the discussion topic pertains to more people. Make sure those people know that they should attend.

A day or so before the practice meeting, send out a pre-read on the topic to be discussed. This will help ground attendees and share context. It will also cut down on the time in the meeting where someone is sharing context, thus maximizing time for discussion and feedback.

After the meeting finishes, make sure to share the meeting notes at the practice channel so other engineers who missed the practice can take a quick look at what was discussed and the related action items.

Ask For Feedback & Iterate

  • Every quarter (or even more frequently if the practice is new) send a survey and ask for feedback
  • Themes that are important to ask about:
    • Is the goal of the practice meeting clear to the participants?
    • Do members feel like they can participate freely and have buy-in?
    • Do members feel like the meeting is a good use of time?
    • Do members have feedback for the agenda
  • After the survey, if feedback is clear, great! Iterate and make the practice even better!
    • If not, consider blocking off the next practice meeting for brainstorming with fellow practice members. Try to get at how the practice can be improved, grouping pieces of feedback into themes and new ideas. Miro boards are useful here!