The Guardian offices in London and Manchester were closed to the majority of staff at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. For the Product and Engineering department as well as the wider company, this meant a rapid change in the way we worked: from the majority of colleagues working a regular week in our King’s Cross headquarters to remote working at scale. Several digital tools proved vital for us …
Agile development:
We have a strong agile development culture at the Guardian, with a regular rhythm of different ceremonies: stand-ups, retrospectives and planning meetings. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know how long the office would be closed, so we kept to our normal routines – and found new benefits in bringing people together in a structured way on a regular basis.
Rupert Bates, a principal developer in our supporter revenue stream, said: “Our standups became a lifeline for those working remotely, especially those living alone – my team mixed things up by rotating the host each day, and ensured we had some fun each morning”.
Likewise, our retrospectives were critical in ensuring we maintained the culture we have encouraged of continuous learning and improvement, and our planning meetings ensured the whole team had clarity on where we were heading and what we were focused on.
Objective Key Results (OKR) framework:
The product and engineering department use OKRs to measure goals and track outcomes. The quarterly schedule of planning during the pandemic was incredibly helpful, allowing teams to plan their work in collaboration with each other and identifying dependencies. This process was critical to transparency across our teams and ensured we were regularly re-evaluating our goals.
Given the rapidly changing news agenda throughout 2020, many of our teams were re-prioritising product enhancements constantly – including the need for our platforms to handle new, innovative ways to tell the unfolding story of the pandemic (such as our Covid-19 data interactive). Communication across the organisation was more important than ever.
Kit:
Every member of the department already had their own company laptop (mainly Apple MacBook Pros and Macbook Airs). In March 2020, these laptops were taken home, and remote offices were set up around dining room tables and in bedrooms. In addition to this, to ensure home working was comfortable, monitors, chairs and other peripherals were made available to those who wanted them.
Virtual tooling access:
The vast majority of our tools are cloud-based, so we didn’t need to be in the office to access them. For the few that are not, our VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection allowed us to access internally hosted tooling easily. Due to this, we had no lag in allowing our teams to develop and deploy products and services straight away. Tools we have built such as Riff-Raff (used to manage deployments), Janus (our AWS authentication platform), as well as third-party services and tools such as GitHub (for code version control), AWS (tools, hosting, storage etc) and Trello (workflow and organisation) were critical.
Google Workspace:
We use Google Workspace extensively throughout the Guardian. Google Chat, Spaces, Gmail and Meet provided the ability to communicate effectively. Products such as Docs, Slides and Sheets fueled collaboration and having these tools already in place reduced friction, allowing us to transition to working remotely with relative ease.
New Workspace tools, such as Google’s Jamboard helped us to run team retrospectives and brainstorming sessions. Jamboard was not a tool widely used before the pandemic but quickly became invaluable, replicating the whiteboard and Post-it note collaboration of the physical world.
What’s next?
The pandemic quickly highlighted tools and services which could be modernised. We were fortunate that most of the tools to empower product development were already in a good place – but there is still work to be done. Within our editorial tools workstream, we have numerous tools which allow our editorial colleagues to publish. There are certainly opportunities to amalgamate and rationalise some of these systems, which involves technical and cultural change.
The pandemic has taught us so much about how we deliver software and organise ourselves – and it’s unquestionable that the cultural changes around remote working are seismic. At the Guardian, we have committed to hybrid working. We are trialling several initiatives to make this as effective as possible, ranging from re-configuring our office space to help facilitate collaboration to the provision of new equipment (including trialling physical Google Jamboards to facilitate hybrid working at scale). These changes are still in their infancy – but our mission remains the same – to create the best products for our readers and journalists. The challenge for us now is how we do that in the best possible way, regardless of where our teams are located.
Development of digital products is central to the Guardian. You could be building the products that showcase our progressive and independent journalism, crafting the tools that journalists use to write their stories, developing the services that allow those stories to be distributed across the globe, or safeguarding our financial future.
If you’re interested in joining our Product and Engineering department, please visit the Guardian News & Media careers page.