Road Framework — An squad alternative for small companies

A project management approach for small teams that help you to deliver faster without losing focus

Years ago, Spotify presented to the world the Squad Framework, a great way for project management with a team approach. It is easy to implement and a great tool to help you focus on different parts of your product. The problem is:

What should I do when I have such a small team that it is not possible to have more than one team?

At the beginning of companies, the scenario of a small team that needs to run development for all products and platforms is really common. The Road framework is a way to help you deliver the most important features as fast as you can, without losing control of maintenance.

Why Roads?

The logic behind this framework is the same as in traffic. So, premises as the ones described below becomes true:

Each task is the equivalent of a vehicle
All vehicles are moving from point A (backlog) to point B (production).
Because each vehicle is a task for a project, some vehicles must go before than other
Each road has a specific number of lanes (roads with more people, has more lanes so they move projects faster)

What is a Traffic Jam?

There is a study that demonstrates how traffic jams are possible even when there are no crossroads or accidents. Those are called “Phantom Traffic Jams”. The basic principle is that a simple slower car holds the cars before it, and spread the stop point to cars before.

The same happens in development when the tasks in the road:

move from one person to another (the equivalent of changing lanes).
the same person is developing two tasks at the same size (the equivalent to winch a car and driving slower).
When a task is dropped in the middle of the road (like a car stopping at the road).

Road types

There are two different road types, each one has a different approach and sizes:

Main-roads: the equivalent to highways that allow vehicles of large and small sizes to move fast and without crossroads in the way. Tasks assigned to those roads are the ones that cannot be stopped because they are very strategic.
Off-roads: equivalent to unpaved roads. It will be used by tasks that can be interrupted due to business changes. They are less strategic but have an important reason to be assigned.

An important element that happens between sprints are the health weeks. They are the equivalent to gas stations in the road where you stop by so you can give a little bit more of maintenance, do a check-up and re-fuel.

Creating roads for each project

In order to make the best usage of roads, it is recommended to prioritize projects in a sequential single line, for each road. It makes it easier for developers to plan and develop focused on the most valuable projects.

The criteria for project prioritization will follow your company strategy. At Ingresse, for example, we proceed like the chart below:

1 main-road: driven by projects aligned with medium/long term company strategy. At Ingresse we intercalate projects from two pipelines: for each 2 project from medium/long term pipeline, we take 1 project from short term pipeline.
2 off-road: divided into 1 road for finance pipeline, with just 1 lane (1 person) dedicated to the project every sprint, and 1 road we call TGIF (Thank God I’m Fresh) that are fulfilled with small and fun tasks with no prioritization defined.

When you get each road planned, team members will get the tasks for the road they are going to “drive”. Since the pipeline is linear, they just pick the first task planned.

Health Stops

The Health Stops was created to solve the necessity to run the technical work that can only be prioritized by developers, and usually, the business never takes a look. The Health is planned, prioritized and managed only by the technical team. At Ingresse they have the duration of 1 week, but it can be managed to have the timestamp that best fits your needs. Examples of tasks that are run in Health periods:

Database migration;
Scripts for task automation;
Improvements and refactors to legacy codes;
Libraries and dependencies updates.

The quality assurance team uses health weeks to focus on sprint tests and interrupt the team in case of need for fixes in the releases. It is like a global pit-stop.

Since sprints at Ingresse has a 2 weeks timespan, health weeks occurs in the following week, counting a total of 3 weeks per sprint cycle.

Team Distribution

In this framework, all people are looking at the same pipeline and working to deliver the most priority projects.

Since there is no backlog apart to each team, all members are aligned with what is the next tasks to be discussed and planned to next sprint.

When the sprint starts, we make sure that each off-road has a minimum of one task. All the other team members must pick up a task from the main road.

If it happens to the team finishes all the tasks before the end of the sprint cycle, they can just pick another task from the pile.

Best Practices

Avoid creating more than one main-road. In our experience, with a single main road, it is already possible to run more than just one project at a time.
In creating off roads, do not assign too many members. Try to keep one or two maximum. Off-roads are designer to be slower.
Do not create off-roads if there is not enough pipeline to justify it. What happens a lot is that teams try to create one off-road to each group or demand type (sales, fin, operations, etc).
Always have at least one off-road. Every company in the world has work to be done that is important but never prioritized. It means viewing ahead.

In general, working with different roads demonstrates itself to be a more flexible way to manage teams. And it was the framework that most lasted in our team and culture.

Beyond that, this framework helped us to gain more visibility about what is more strategic and what is not because they are separated in specific roads.

For the companies that have tons of products and a small team, this approach of sequential prioritization, intercalating tasks at the same road, or managing them in different roads, guarantees that all the important work is done faster without forgetting to take care of the rest.