Introduction

Who is this for?

This playbook is written for managers, with the following contexts in mind.

• Corporate: The mechanisms described here were refined over the years through diverse corporate environments. It fits tight-knit groups of 5 engineers to multiple teams comprising hundreds of engineers. It assumes managers and teams have some autonomy to define their own process - which should be the case in most well functioning organizations.

• Consultancy: The playbook broadly applies, though managers should remain flexible to customer's environments.

• Startups: For startups, some parts of the playbook should be emphasized, notably leadership, while other parts are less relevant, for instance writing artifacts. On a personal note, if I ever embark on my own startup adventure, I'll use the playbook as-is if we grow beyond the foundational five.

Is this playbook Agile?

Yes, though it depends what we mean by Agile. Does it follow the Agile Manifesto? Yes, it does. Does it follow an Agile methodology? Yes, the core day-to-day engineering loop uses Kanban. That said, the playbook doesn't borrow much from Scrum. While it may seem silly to make this distinction, the term Agile is sometimes used interchangeably with Scrum (or some flavor of it), so it's a useful distinction.