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Epic meetings

Written by Erwin de Vries on 5th March 2015

• epic meet

Sometimes, in a fast growing team, things don’t run as smoothly anymore as they used to. More and more (sometimes unnecessary) bugs show up, new features don’t live up to expectations or are finished much later than expected. An intervention is needed.

Go Epic

We try to come up with solutions for these problems on an ‘Epic Meet’. An Epic Meet is a company wide meeting somewhere away from the office. Everybody is present; from the owner to the interns (never underestimate what interns can bring into a discussion).

Every Epic Meet turns out to be immensely inspiring. Being away from your usual workplace, no ringing phones and no distracting colleagues or customers contributes to deep and intense discussions which lead to very fruitful decisions. At least two times a year we try to have an Epic Meet.

Building the APP and going user centric

This first meeting we decided we needed to build an app, especially because of the coming of 4G. Also, we wanted to switch from a device centric platform to a user centric platform. After almost two years we are still working on both and still think they are the right things to do.

Our first epic meet (28 June 2013)

Testing and milestones

This last meeting two colleagues gave a hands-on presentation about testing, to persuade the team to not just think about, but really integrate testing into our development process. One of our long lasting wishes is to automate our deployment process and this is one of the first steps towards continuous delivery.

We also decided to introduce milestones in our planning. We hope that concrete, medium term goals, achievable in two months, will be motivating the team.

Our last epic meet (19 February 2015)

Get out of the building

I can encourage any team to just get out of the office and zoom out on what, why and how you are doing the things you do. The results of an Epic Meet will surprise you.