Embrace change, work smart and drive focus: Delivery Hero’s Agile Playbook

Rahul Bhattacharya is a Global Agile Coach at Delivery Hero’s Berlin headquarters. As part of a collective of Agile coaches located in our offices around the world, Rahul supports teams and individuals to apply Agile values into daily routines, embrace change, and drive effective and scalable ways of working. 

Find out more about how Delivery Hero incorporates Agile principles into our work across the globe. 

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What is agility?

By now, you have probably heard of Agile and/or Lean. Agile ways of working have become a new standard of working in the tech product industry over the past 20 years, but this method applies to just about any part of an organization. At its core, agility is about continuously monitoring what’s going on around you and reacting to change. 

At Delivery Hero, it is no different. As a company that embraces change as part of our DNA, we aim to be agile rather than do agile. And for us, it is a way of working in which teams work autonomously, in a self-organized fashion, and have short iterations with feedback loops that are aimed at delivering value to the customer quicker. 

In a traditional “waterfall” way of working, you plan your work up-front for a given amount of time (usually weeks or months), create a roadmap with requirements, and deliver in a “big bang” at the very end. For some projects, this is a great approach. But in a complex environment, where customer needs can constantly change, this can create a big risk in terms of investing a lot of effort into something that might not satisfy stakeholder or customer needs. 

Agile ways of working address this risk embracing uncertainty and involving the customer feedback as often as possible. Constantly iterating and changing your plans is part of the process, based on new information that you learn during the different phases of product development such as product discovery and delivery.

Putting the ‘global’ in Agile

The global Agile Chapter is a collection of Agile Coaches, based in Delivery Hero’s different entities around the world, such as PedidosYa in South America, Talabat in the Middle East, YemekSepeti in Turkey, and Delivery Hero Korea in South Korea. 

As a global Agile Chapter, our primary goal is to guide individuals and teams in the organization on how to effectively navigate under the umbrella of lean/agile principles and values. We intend to drive efficient and effective ways of working (working smarter not harder) that are simple, focused, and scalable at the same time. We take great pride in leveraging practices from around the world, as the Chapter benefits from dozens of coaches working across all Delivery Hero entities. 

The Agile Coaches are located in our headquarters around the world so that they can work closely with management, teams and individuals on a daily basis. On top of that, we get together as a Chapter to tackle problems that we see across the organization, help each other by creating and co-facilitating sessions, and learn from each other through regular meetups and shadowing opportunities. 

We take great pride in leveraging practices from around the world

In practice, this means discussing with groups and individuals how they can incorporate the agile values and principles into their daily routine. It means introducing practices such as standups, retrospectives, estimations, weekly planning, and describing why they can be invaluable in a specific context. We guide teams through the process of creating practices that are tailored to their specific context and based on their needs, so that teams can be agile.

Creating space for strategy 

One of the areas that the Global Agile Chapter focuses on is to support the company with increasing self-organization, and as such help teams and individuals focus on more strategic problems. At the same time, we aim to ensure that all of our teams can benefit from the partnership that we provide by coaching others on the basic principles of lean and agile for their own context. 

To solve this challenge, we decided to experiment with the concept of an Agile Playbook. This is a platform for all Delivery Hero teams and individuals to sign up for dozens of different Agile and Lean workshops, trainings and sessions that support them to improve their knowledge and skills around their ways of working.

 The goal of this playbook is to ensure that there’s a fundamental baseline of knowledge on Agile and Lean practices around the company and that this knowledge can be learned in an autonomous manner. This provides participants with the right knowledge, capabilities, and tools to unleash their full potential and helps them to achieve their goals while working in a healthy and sustainable work environment. 

Work Agile, think Agile, be Agile 

Just like the Agile method itself, the playbook is an ever-evolving platform, with a continuously growing number of topics. Each chapter – including Scrum, Kanban, Product, OKRs, and Agile Leadership – consists of training and workshops that explore different aspects of the topic in detail. For the Scrum cluster, for example, we have modules such as estimations, artifacts, and roles. 

Some of these sessions are recorded and can be watched remotely while others are live sessions, led by one of our Agile Coaches from the global chapter. Training sessions typically mean that the session is mostly theory with some practical examples and interactive aspects. Workshops, on the other hand, are focussed mainly on generating tangible results for individuals or teams, for example in their vision statement creation or OKR creation. 

The Agile Playbook itself represents some of the agile values, as we are constantly iterating on it by adding different training modules, such as OKR basics and Product Discovery fundamentals.

After each training or workshop, an Agile Coach gathers feedback from the participants about how relevant the content was and how we can make the sessions even more valuable for them. Through such feedback, we will continue to evolve the value proposition of our Playbook and build on the content that is valuable and applicable to Delivery Hero employees. After all, we try to live up to Delivery Hero’s value of “We are Heroes because we care.”

How can employees leverage this?

Delivery Hero employees around the world can learn about how to be adaptive and responsive to change in their environment by signing up for Playbook sessions. Regardless of their team, department or function in the organization, we offer workshops and training to all employees in different stages of creating value (marketing, product & tech, legal, etc). 

The Playbook is an inhouse training platform to teach the basic concepts of Lean and Agile, and dive deeper into specific frameworks that help us become more agile.

Each training or workshop is adjusted to the Delivery Hero context by combining both the theoretical and practical aspects through a combination of self-study training materials (pre-recorded sessions, articles, decks) as well as hands-on workshops where attendees can practice this newly gained knowledge. 

Read more on how we work Agile at Delivery Hero on our tech blog.