A review: “Parenting”, the new startup
I’m a Dad at this startup people call “Parenting”. I’m CTO, my wife is CMO.
Our startup culture has some of the things you’d expect, and some differences.
Project management
At Parenting, we found waterfall didn’t work. At about the age of 13, customer feedback totally went against what we’d planned out at the beginning.
Kanban seemed attractive, but we live in Utah, and had a hard time sticking to a reasonable WIP limit of 2 children at a time.
So we go mainstream with scrum — but our sprint retros are ad hoc, sprint reviews are mostly for grandparents, and (similar to whatever company you work for) no matter how much it doesn’t actually follow the manifesto we call it agile anyway :)
Extreme programming
At Parenting, two people pairing on everything is the ideal. Initially we thought it’d be more efficient to use a standard Git flow. But, someone would open up a Pull Request, lots of comments would flow, some people skipped all that and simply merged and force pushed. Merge conflicts were left and not resolved. It was a mess. So, we adhere strictly to paired programming now.
Pro-tip: don’t let the kids trick you into mob programming.
Releasing to production
The release cycle here is much slower — 18 years or so. But, we commit beta stuff to production all the time, as there is no staging environment. Yes, everyone seems to notice the bugs. We put them in a backlog (which means they’ll never get worked on).
While there is no official QA team here, grandparents seem to do a decent job. Even when Product Owners think they have thought through all the requirements, it’s amazing the amount of edge cases your customers will find.
We do rely on the cloud via the prayer protocol.
Culture
Drawbacks:
- There is no PTO or sick time
- You do work around the clock
But:
- You’ll be taken care of in retirement
- Small spot-bonuses are given frequently
- You’ll have lots of room to grow and autonomy
- You’ll have significant impact on the full team right away
Simply put, I love it here. It’s the best startup I’ve ever worked at.
