The Workflow Challenge
Every engineering team faces the same tension: how do you plan for the long term while staying responsive to what is happening right now? Pure sprint-based planning can be too rigid. Pure Kanban can lack direction. At PointFive, we use a hybrid approach that gives us the best of both worlds.
Two Types of Work
We categorize all engineering work into two buckets:
- Big Rock Projects -- These are significant initiatives that span a month or more. They involve clear requirements, technical planning, and cross-functional coordination. Examples include launching a new cloud provider integration or redesigning a core detection engine.
- Ad-hoc Kanban Work -- These are smaller tasks that flow in continuously: bug fixes, customer requests, minor improvements, and operational work. They do not require elaborate planning but still need to get done promptly.
Every Pod maintains both streams simultaneously. Big Rocks provide strategic direction. Kanban keeps the product healthy and customers happy.
Two Modes of Delivery
How we staff and organize work depends on the nature of the project:
- Organic Mode -- In this mode, a Pod works independently on its own Big Rock. The team has all the skills and context it needs to deliver without outside help. This is the default operating mode for most work.
- Tiger Teams -- For larger, cross-cutting initiatives that require specialists from multiple Pods, we form temporary Tiger Teams. These are focused groups assembled for a specific mission, disbanded when the work is done. Tiger Teams move fast because they bring together exactly the right people without permanently restructuring the organization.
The Feature Lifecycle
Regardless of delivery mode, features follow a consistent lifecycle:
- Brainstorming -- Ideas surface from customer feedback, research, competitive analysis, or internal observations. We capture and discuss them openly.
- Requirements -- Product Managers work with researchers and engineers to define what we are building and why. Clear requirements prevent wasted effort.
- Technical Planning (RFCs) -- For Big Rock projects, engineers write RFCs that outline the approach, tradeoffs, and implementation plan. These are reviewed by peers before work begins.
- Implementation -- Engineers build, test, and iterate. Work is tracked in Linear with clear milestones.
- Delivery -- Features are shipped behind feature flags, validated with early users, and rolled out progressively.
Guiding Principles
Three principles keep our workflow grounded:
- Simplicity -- We resist over-engineering our processes. If a practice does not clearly help us ship better software, we drop it.
- Efficiency -- Every meeting, artifact, and review should earn its place. We are ruthless about eliminating waste in our workflows, not just in our customers' cloud bills.
- Iteration -- We ship early, learn fast, and improve continuously. Perfection is the enemy of progress.
Speed and Quality Together
A common misconception is that moving fast means cutting corners. We disagree. Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive -- they are mutually reinforcing. Good planning prevents rework. Clean code deploys faster. Automated tests catch issues before customers do. Our workflow is designed to make the fast path and the right path the same path.