From four to forty in four years - trials and tribulations of growing a team

Between 2016 and 2020, the PureGym IT Team grew from 4 to 40 people. During that time Rich worked closely with them to navigate the tricky process of scaling. This talk is a journey through that growth period and discusses the variety of processes and practices that were applied in order to stay "Agile".

We'll touch on the various approaches taken including topics such as Scrum, Lean, Kanban, GIST planning, Lean Startup, DevOps, IaC, Azure, Story Mapping, BDD, TDD, Project vs Product and we'll be looking at the successes, failures and lessons learned.

We'll also look at how concepts from Team Topologies were applied, what team structures and interaction models were chosen and how that shifted the team dynamic. We will discuss what, in Rich's opinion, has worked well and what hasn't worked well during that time.

At very least you will walk away from this session with a long list of books to read and hopefully some insights into whether you might want to try some of the approaches discussed during the talk.