So I'm Casey Jones and I'm a program manager at Buckle. Buckle is a start up a financial services start up.We were around before COVID, we experienced COVID and despite all the disruption that that time introduced, we were still able to grow and we've had many successful achievements and today I will talk about how we did that. So I'll set the stage with a bit of some back story. So we're a financial services start up, catered to the gig economy. Our flagship product is auto insurance for gig drivers which are Lyft drivers, doordash Instacart drivers who use their personal auto to make money on, on these kinds of driving platforms. So in 2019, we had a lot of momentum. We launched our proof of concept in Georgia and we have engaged one of the major rideshare, major national rideshare companies to expand our proof of concept. In February 2020 we launched our big partnership. It was very exciting and one week later, the world shut down, um COVID hit and it disrupted so many things and you all were there. So I don't need to go into all the reasons why that was disruptive.

But as a start up company, we had a lot of questions about what our future looks like. How will the demand for our product change? Will this be a, a two month thing, a two year thing or will this, will we be forever changed? Will we need to pivot? Uh Despite all of the disruptions that co was introduced, we still grew and we, we met, we had a lot of great achievements. We introduced a new product offering to our members called Adequacy. We secured our series a funding and our auto insurance had many expansion milestones and reflecting over the last two years and the ways that were successful, there were these three key themes that emerged and this is what I will share with you today. OK. Coming back to our story a bit. So during COVID, the demand for rideshare services fell drastically for obvious reasons. But our members as a result, experienced huge financial disruption. And with Sophie Ride requests coming in, our members were looking for work elsewhere and we anticipated as buckle that the demand for our rideshare auto insurance uh might decrease near term. So at the company level, this is where we really leaned on our mission, which is to help our members achieve economic freedom. Well, the needs of our members was changing and so we saw an opportunity for a new product offering called advocacy under the advocacy program.

We helped our ride share our, our members, our drivers access government funding that became available through the Cares Act. And many of our drivers didn't realize that they were even eligible for these government grants and loans. Also, once they did find out about it, the, the application process for these, these loans and grants under the Cares Act were very complex. They were very long applications and they had a lot of um financially complex information that you had to provide. And when you're driving on three different driving apps and have to pull financial information from each that's in a different format. It, it all was just a very complex uh issue. So, through our data and technology solutions, we created an automated government relief application to help our drivers access these grants and loans. And the application time went from several hours to just about five minutes. And on average, our members received more than $3000 in grants and loans in 2020. So leaning on our mission in this way, not only helped us, but it also helped our members, which was fabulous at the team level. We really leaned on our ground rules and our ceremonies. So we had this new product offering that we were building, but we still had our auto insurance product. Um And um through this, we had to right size our process and figure out, OK, we have this virtual environment. We have this new thing that we're building.

So we really leaned on our retrospectives to reflect on all the change and the ways we needed to change and optimize our process to be successful. We also kept an agreed upon mixture of tech debt, our auto insurance product and our new product in each sprint and overall leaning on our foundations in these ways, really helped provide stability and consistency amidst the change agile. So I think the the beauty of the agile is that you keep what works and you change what doesn't it's a framework that is purposely incomplete so that you can reshape it and mold it to be exactly what you and your team need. I mean, we really think about it. Agile is built to respond to change like this and we embraced that. So we worked in Scrum and we have two weeks from cycles. So within just two weeks, we were able to have a refined backlog and begin building our advocacy product. Also, we are building this new thing, but we also had our auto insurance product, but we did not add additional teammates to our, to our team. So we had to right size our workload to be a sustainable amount of work. And also along with that just the nature of the virtual work environment inhibited collaboration. So we didn't know if our our pace of working and completing work would be the same or slower.

So we really, this is a really good time to right size our workload and we leveraged velocity calculations to figure out what is this new way of uh what is our new amount of work? So this is where I'm getting to. So we use our velocity um over several sprints, we iterated on our velocity and tried to figure out, OK, how much are we completing in each sprint? And what can we uh how can we use our velocity to plan the future sprints? But I think the most helpful thing that we did was we only planned 90% of our velocity in each sprint, which left 10% available for change. And for unknown and generally being able to get a better feel of our workload without inherently overworking ourselves from the video, we also simplified our work. So with this exciting new advocacy product, we still have insurance and we still wanted to progress that in certain ways.

But rather than just saying, ok, let's keep doing all of it and over work. Um Or rather than saying, ok, let's, let's just push insurance down the road and we'll get to it when we get to it, we try to find creative solutions to achieve the similar functions or resolve uh solve different stories in a simpler way. So for example, rather than building a full future in house, is there a third party component that we can leverage, that will help us achieve the same goal, but in a shorter period of time and with fewer people working on it. We also had really motivated people and we, we started doing a lot of cross training and, and people wanted to learn more outside of their specialty. And I was perusing our retrospective to try to get up a few tidbits for this talk. And I found I came across one comment that said if you were lost in the woods and you had no way to get home. What are 10 things that buckle would not be able to do without you? And so this created a list of things that we wanted to start cross training on. And originally, the purpose of this was if somebody was suddenly out for two weeks sick, we wanted them to be off of work and recover.

We didn't want, we wanted them to have that time, but we wanted as bubble to keep going. And so originally, it was just to make our team more well rounded so that more than one people are more than one, a few people could work on the same feature. But there are also some really nice side effects too because we were able with more people knowing more components of the platforms. Our collaboration increased our conversations got deeper and I sensed that people were more confident and better able to contribute to a solution, which was a really nice um effect of all the cross training that we did. Also, I'm gonna come back to our retrospectives in all three of these sections. But we really did have a strong uh retrospective um, process and ceremony and some of the fun things that we we did is, you know, all this change is happening. There are all these different ideas to improve our process. And sometimes the idea was a wacky idea to improve our progress. But if there was a gold nugget of potential in there, we would try or if it was just a, a normal idea, it was not always wacky, but we welcomed all ideas. And sometimes we'd say, all right, let's try this for two weeks.

Let's do a two week experiment on this process and see what happens. And most of the time we, the experiment was successful and we kept it. But a lot of times also our experiment failed and that was OK. Um These, these two week experiments gave us the ability to try new things without the fear of failure. Something worked great. If it failed, throw it away and try the next thing I, I could probably go through every single agile principle and think of different ways that um we applied them. And at the root of it, agile was really built to handle change and respond to change. And we were able to apply agile in so many new ways of this COVID disruption and we were successful because of it. All right. So now this is getting to more of the individual level of disruption that each person experienced, I found it very imperative for us to acknowledge challenges and to most importantly, trust each other in order for us to be successful. Before COVID, I actually was on our marketing team.

I was a project manager in a different group. And then when everything started shifting and changing with COVID, I moved over to our tech team to be our Scrum master and do product owner duties. And I also did Q A. So here I was this new person joining a team that was experiencing a ton of disruption. I was the only woman and I was about to lead this team through a huge transformation and potentially away from our big ambitious start up idea. And I remember one of our first meetings that I led, I said, hey, I, I know that I don't understand all the details of these things yet and I don't know your ways of working. So please type in if you want to suggest something different that would be better or add a little bit of commentary that it's just obvious. I don't, I, I don't, I'm not kidding or I don't know, I read out this user story one time and I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I had no idea what I just said, but I gave myself the grace to be wrong and to not understand something. And I trusted my team to not judge me for my lack of knowledge.

And I trusted that we were all working on this together to move us forward together as a team. Um Coming back to the retrospectives again, one of the reasons why retrospectives were what were so strong is because we trusted each other. It was truly a safe place to talk about challenges to not be wrong and trust in this group setting is crucial to not be afraid to say something in a group setting makes a huge difference. On the flip side. As fabulous as your group communication might be. There will always be things that you can only learn about somebody in one on one settings. And I made a point to try to um build one on one relationships with each person on my team. If you go back to the velocity example, we retrospective and processed the heck out of our velocity calculation and me as a process person, it was very satisfying to me. Once we got that moving like a well oiled machine, our our velocity forecast and, and everything. But velocity is a number and there are humans behind that number. So sometimes having that one on one conversation with somebody gives you a, a better picture into their workload and other factors that affect their ability to complete work successfully or unsuccessfully and help you plan uh best plan the work for your team.

So when things are changing and when you're considering process changes, don't forget about the human factor of your process. As well. All right. So 2022 here we are, we are on the other side. Um Our momentum is back and we've honestly surpassed some of our big, big audacious goals from 2019 that we had to question when COVID started. And so we have a lot of momentum today and it's a very exciting time. Our development team that went through all this hardship together is still here. We all still work here and we've in fact expanded to have three in-house development teams. Our auto insurance product is still expanding. It has a lot of momentum and our advocacy product has actually morphed into a full suite of services under our membership product. Um All aimed at helping our customers achieve economic freedom. So thank you for listening to our story. Um These, these are truly unprecedented times, but we are now on the other side and we have a lot to be proud of. I hope if you haven't tried some of these things that I've shared today that you're able to try them and that they are successful for you too. Thank you. And if there are any questions, I'll stick around. I've got a question in the chat.

How did you measure the success of your sprint? Great question. Um uh The retrospective were definitely a time where we measured that. I, I don't think that we really looked at our sprints as successful or unsuccessful, I think um I'm trying to think of an example. So one example is we kept on having stories that um we would start something and then it wouldn't get finished, it would be blocked. And so we would have to move it to the next sprint, but it wasn't seen as unsuccessful. It was just seen as, ok, let's figure out how to split this amongst the other sprints. Let's figure out how to unblock it. I uh I think we truly were just a for uh a positive team that um we, we, we didn't really look at uh some of our work as failure. But um if we, if you asking about maybe metrics, we kept track of velocity and uh in terms of story points. Um and we did in our retrospective, celebrate the things that worked. Um And so in that way, we kind of measured success of our sprints. So Jennifer, uh question is we're trying to move to agile, not everybody in the team is fully bought in. It's been hard to break some of the waterfall habits.

I definitely understand that especially in, in, in insurance industry, insurance has been around for a very long time and there's a lot of things um that are inherently not possible to be agile. I mean, um when you're trying to get your product approved in an individual state, it can be a monthly process where you're relying on the department of insurance to approve you and, and let you move forward. So, um that's kind of an extreme example. But what I would recommend to you is are there smaller components of the agile principles or methodologies that you can start, that you can start with? And you don't even have to call them by the specific agile terms. If it's the agile terms that are scary, can you try some of the same concepts with different names? And it's almost kind of inception of these agile concepts into the team. Um You could also try a two week experiment like we did and say, hey, this agile concept is, has a lot of benefits and here's where it has worked here is where it hasn't, can we do a two week long experiment and try this out? And if it's successful, let's iterate on it and try to keep going and if it, if it fails, then that's, that's OK too. What can we do if your team is not good at estimating and how can we help them improve at their estimates? Great question.

Um In our experience, we use the Fibonacci sequence for scoring and the, when we're estimating the stories, the more uncertainty we had, the higher the score went. Um Also, I think we had a rule that if a story was eight points or more than eight points, you had to break it up, um break it up into one card for discovery and that's a couple of points to just get your, get a little bit more knowledge of what needs to happen and then break down, then you're able to break down the other points of the rest of that original card into individual stories or, you know, be able to better estimate it.

But, um, trying out some ground rules like no more than eight points per story might be a good place to start. All right. Well, that is the end of my time slot, but thank you all so much for tuning in and listening to our story. I hope you have a nice rest of your week.