Client Webinar Series (Mar 2023) – Skyscanner

How Skyscanner embedded a team metrics culture for continuous improvement

Team metrics are in vogue, and there is no shortage of literature espousing the value of various combinations of metrics that will lead your team(s) to delivery stardom.

In this webinar, Skyscanner shared their journey to build a data-driven Agile organisation with Plandek, from acknowledging that data was critical to realising their competitive advantage, to changing their engineering management culture to one that valued and utilised these metrics to drive greater improvement at scale. They shared what originally took them down this path including the signs that change was needed and the impact it has had.

In this webinar we covered:

• The values Skyscanner created to assess the various tool providers to find one that they felt would enable their team and more importantly reinforce the cultural change that was the fundamental goal of this exercise
• How their understanding of what they needed evolved throughout the exploration process and how they ran trials with teams to understand this better
• Their interpretation of the most important metrics, the sources they were inspired by and how they expected to need to augment them
• The challenges they discovered with adoption, those they predicted and how they altered their plans to adapt to them
• Some of the improvements that teams are starting to see
• Some of the greater company initiatives that this change has empowered

Skyscanner is still very much on their journey and at the moment they are guiding 80 squads (~600 engineers) through this change. They are seeing good levels of adoption and insights being acted on, having created cross-organisation communities of practice to support this change and bed it in for the long term. They will talk about the principles we have used to drive this adoption.

Webinar Guests

Ramsay Ashby is a Senior Software Delivery Operations manager, with over a decade of experience working both in and with agile teams. He’s also worked in environments with more traditional methodologies, as well as being part of two agile transformations. He began his career in engineering, initially as a test engineer where he focussed heavily on developing automated tests and automated test frameworks, before moving into development engineering where he was a team lead for a globally distributed team for several years. Today, Ramsay is responsible for presenting and maintaining the suite of internal agile training courses that Skyscanner offers to its employees. Ramsay works closely with a broad spectrum of employees across the business, ranging from recent university graduates up to director level, helping them and their teams to perform at their best.

Jack Spencer is a Senior Software Operations Manager at Skyscanner, with a background primarily focused on agile delivery, coaching and agile transformation. Within his role at Skyscanner, Jack mainly works with squads and tribes to improve the flow of value delivered through coaching and hands-on support. Jack’s passion within this area is the human aspect. Understanding people, how to bring groups together and create environments where they can thrive. In Jack’s free time, he enjoys keeping active and regularly can be found in a Muay Thai or Boxing gym.