Weekly Sprints and Abstract Expressionism
I look forward to Monday mornings. Not only because I’m excited about each one of my products. Nor because of the new extra healthy breakfast options the company brings in to get the week going.
I look forward to Mondays because one of my teams starts it with a brief lesson in art.
Let me explain.
Every Monday morning we hold our sprint planning. Like most agile teams we spend 30 minutes looking at our JIRA board. We discuss priories and themes for the week. Talk about how we’ll achieve our goals.
We put this team together in early 2015 and starting with “Sprint 1” we’ve met like this close to a hundred times now.
Almost all teams give names to their sprints and to make things more fun try to keep names to something other than version or release numbers.
First we named our sprints after bands and musicians. This was kind of fun because we introduced each other to a few songs for that week’s artist.
Once we’ve gone through the alphabet with band names, we started naming our sprints after superheroes. This is when we started showing the hero of the week on the TV screen before getting into planning. It was neat to learn about super-humans, mutants, villains. Chat about their outlandish story arcs and incredibly creative abilities.
As our coworkers were getting their Mondays started it was also fun watching their confused and sleepy faces as they would catch a glimpse of Metron through the glass doors of our meeting room.
Once we wrapped up our superhero sprints we talked about what’s next and settled on visual artists. This has definitely been my favorite so far.
Every week we’ll rotate who’s presenting the painter and that person will do some lightweight research and educate us about their pick for the week.
The reason why I especially favor the Artist naming theme is because there are so many perfect parallels with tech:
- Artists draw on a blend of inspiration from peers and previous works to bring their own innovative solutions
- MVP-like sketch drawings turn into masterpieces years later
- A way to world renowned works is littered with thousands of forgotten obscure pieces that didn’t hit the mark
- Visual layer is just one component. The most creative work is rooted in breaking the status quo with brand new takes on approach, materials and application
Every Monday we get to experience and talk about these things as a team.
A reminder of hundreds of years of rule breaking and trend setting. Rebellion, influence, tenacity, mastery.
So far we’ve marveled at the astonishing marine art of Aivazovsky.
Zoomed in and out of Bosch’s triptychs.
Got a little sad by the tragic life of Gorky (cover image at the top).
We even squinted at the photos of Parisian streets as we tried to find Invader’s hidden graffiti art.
Naming sprints is nothing new. Yet I feel that the few minutes each of us spends on research and sharing works of artists brings us closer together as a team. There’s a lot to uncover as we hear each other talk about why a certain artist was selected or which particular pieces resonate the most.
I look forward to Monday mornings.
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