Our first Release Summit

Last week, the "Release Summit" took place for the first time within Faktor Zehn Product Development. The goal of the virtual appointment was to create another exchange opportunity for the individual software development teams and to promote cross-team communication.

The 3-hour agenda of the meeting included a total of five items.
At the beginning of the meeting, there was a welcome to the approximately 30 product development employees. During this, the agenda was presented and the participants were divided into four different groups for breakout sessions.

Within these breakout sessions, the groups each had the task as an "ice-breaker" to assign all photos of the employees from product development to the correct development teams. For this task, our Factor Ten Wiki was used, which offers the possibility for collaborative work. New colleagues in particular had the opportunity to get a better overview of the individual teams when assigning the photos of the employees.

The next agenda item involved all colleagues sharing their personal highlights from the release so far with their respective groups. Since the breakout session groups were heterogeneously mixed, this allowed everyone to gain insight into what the other product development teams had been doing over the past weeks and months, or where there were problems, for example. This led to certain topics being picked up and initial conversations about potential solutions to problems.

As part of the next major agenda item, participants had the opportunity to jot down topic suggestions for open discussion and exchange sessions on a virtual board. Everyone was then allowed to vote on these suggested topics. New breakout sessions were then opened for the topics with the most votes. In total, this resulted in two major breakout sessions. One of them dealt with the topic of advanced training in the context of the Factor Ten Academy. The other group, in turn, dealt with topics related to the Faktor Zehn Suite. As a result, there was intensive discussion within the two discussion rounds. In some cases, even measures and wishes were recorded, which will now be pursued in retrospect in order to be able to optimize processes in particular.

At the end of the meeting, all employees had the opportunity to leave their feedback on the virtual board. This feedback was taken up by the organizational team and used as an opportunity for potential optimization during the next Release Summit.

Basically, it remains to be said that the majority of the participants would like to see a regular Release Summit and were pleased about the opportunity for an additional and cross-team exchange.

We are very pleased to be able to offer our employees this opportunity and are looking forward to seeing how the topics will develop in future exchange meetings.

Your Faktor Zehn-Team