2019/10

The hill I die on will be golden brown and delicious.

When Kessel Run was a baby organization, we were fed breakfast together, almost every day. We learned that eating together helped start each day off on the right foot.

When we got our own office, things changed, and we weren't fed anymore -- we had to fend for ourselves.

Thus was born "Waffle Wednesdays" -- the 40 employees chipped in for a couple of cute novelty waffle makers and a couple of volunteers agreed to arrive early on Wednesday mornings so we could eat together.

Then we grew. We grew from 40 people to over 400 in the span of six months. And Waffle Wednesday didn't scale.

On Waffle Wednesdays, most people didn't get a waffle. Even if they wanted one.

Three Waffle Makers.

The Problem

Two to Four Volunteers.

At first, the folks that had founded Waffle Wednesday complained that not enough people were helping, but after volunteering for several Wednesdays in a row, I noticed something important:

Even when more people volunteered, we seemed busier, but we didn't actually serve more waffles.

First thing we needed was more cooking surfaces. The waffle irons we had were so slow that no matter how many volunteers we had, we were capped at serving about 36 waffles.

We could have tried to do some math and estimate the best system and waited until all the parts were in place, but I'm a lean-agile junky -- we just bought a larger 4-waffle iron and tried again.

With the additional workhorse, we hit about 80 waffles an hour.

At first, I thought I'd solved it. We started getting compliments from more Kessel Runners on how good the waffles were. Mission Accomplished, right?

Then I asked my coworker, Jay, what he thought about the waffles.

And he said he'd never had one.

Oops.

Jay was a team member who took the train to work, and arrived exactly 10 minutes before the standup every morning, in the crush of other commuters.

Jay liked waffles, but he also ate breakfast before he boarded the train, so he would never, ever wait around for one.

This made Jay the ideal user to interview. If a waffle was available, Jay would always eat it, and he'd generally tell us if it was better or worse than the week before.

That meant we had a new one metric that mattered, and it was the simplest one of all:

New problem:

Did Jay get a waffle this morning?

Armed with a new metric, over the coming month we bought two more 4x waffle makers. . .

. . .And blew the primary break room circuit breaker.

Oops.

Until now, I had never needed documentation. If I wasn't there, they could figure it out (plug in waffle makers, mix batter, feed people).

So I made a couple of very simple diagrams and put them on top of the waffle makers in the storage cabinet.

New problem:

We had to make sure we spread the waffle makers across our break-area.

Armed with more waffle makers, and knowledge that kept us from tripping the breakers. We started making enough waffles for Jay to get one (seems the sweet-spot was between 120 and 200 per day).

. . . and people started being late to their team stand-ups.

Oops.

Now that 100+ people were pausing as they walked in the door to pick up a waffle, everyone's arrival at work was blocked by a milling crowd of confused software developers who hadn't had their first cup of office coffee yet.

New problem:

Our self-service station was a cluster-fluffle.

Time for another design artifact.

This time it's a diagram telling the volunteers how to lay out the table.

We experimented a bit and found a way to arrange things and add a sign with an arrow saying "line forms here" with everything staged in order (plates, utensils, fresh waffles, butter/syrup/fruit, etc).

When the dust settled on the fourth iteration, we had built a mechanism that would let 4 volunteers feed 200+ employees elegantly, in less than an hour.

Along the way we refined a lot of other parts of the process*, but these were the most interesting highlights of how applying lean-agile thinking helped us quickly approach the problem with a minimum of planning and effort, and only two diagrams for documentation.

Lean. Agile. Golden Brown. Delicious.

*(we did fight one minor war against US Military Bureaucracy that got so-out-of-hand it's still referred to as "waffle-gate", but that's another story).

The hill I die on will be golden brown and delicious.

When Kessel Run was a baby organization, we were fed breakfast together, almost every day. We learned that eating together helped start each day off on the right foot.

When we got our own office, things changed, and we weren't fed anymore -- we had to fend for ourselves.

Thus was born "Waffle Wednesdays" -- the 40 employees chipped in for a couple of cute novelty waffle makers and a couple of volunteers agreed to arrive early on Wednesday mornings so we could eat together.

Then we grew. We grew from 40 people to over 400 in the span of six months. And Waffle Wednesday didn't scale.

On Waffle Wednesdays, most people didn't get a waffle. Even if they wanted one.

Three Waffle Makers.

The Problem

Two to Four Volunteers.

At first, the folks that had founded Waffle Wednesday complained that not enough people were helping, but after volunteering for several Wednesdays in a row, I noticed something important:

Even when more people volunteered, we seemed busier, but we didn't actually serve more waffles.

First thing we needed was more cooking surfaces. The waffle irons we had were so slow that no matter how many volunteers we had, we were capped at serving about 36 waffles.

We could have tried to do some math and estimate the best system and waited until all the parts were in place, but I'm a lean-agile junky -- we just bought a larger 4-waffle iron and tried again.

With the additional workhorse, we hit about 80 waffles an hour.

At first, I thought I'd solved it. We started getting compliments from more Kessel Runners on how good the waffles were. Mission Accomplished, right?

Then I asked my coworker, Jay, what he thought about the waffles.

And he said he'd never had one.

Oops.

Jay was a team member who took the train to work, and arrived exactly 10 minutes before the standup every morning, in the crush of other commuters.

Jay liked waffles, but he also ate breakfast before he boarded the train, so he would never, ever wait around for one.

This made Jay the ideal user to interview. If a waffle was available, Jay would always eat it, and he'd generally tell us if it was better or worse than the week before.

That meant we had a new one metric that mattered, and it was the simplest one of all:

New problem:

Did Jay get a waffle this morning?

Armed with a new metric, over the coming month we bought two more 4x waffle makers. . .

. . .And blew the primary break room circuit breaker.

Oops.

Until now, I had never needed documentation. If I wasn't there, they could figure it out (plug in waffle makers, mix batter, feed people).

So I made a couple of very simple diagrams and put them on top of the waffle makers in the storage cabinet.

New problem:

We had to make sure we spread the waffle makers across our break-area.

Armed with more waffle makers, and knowledge that kept us from tripping the breakers. We started making enough waffles for Jay to get one (seems the sweet-spot was between 120 and 200 per day).

. . . and people started being late to their team stand-ups.

Oops.

New problem:

Our self-service station was a cluster-fluffle.

Time for another design artifact.

This time it's a diagram telling the volunteers how to lay out the table.

We experimented a bit and found a way to arrange things and add a sign with an arrow saying "line forms here" with everything staged in order (plates, utensils, fresh waffles, butter/syrup/fruit, etc).

When the dust settled on the fourth iteration, we had built a mechanism that would let 4 volunteers feed 200+ employees elegantly, in less than an hour.

Email

patrick.gonet.pro@gmail.com

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