Fast-growing startup ManoMano helps 300 developers in 40 engineering teams leverage their expertise
ManoMano is an online marketplace for DIY, home improvement, and gardening products. It’s a community of home and DIY lovers that enables them to exchange tips and advice on their DIY or gardening projects. In addition to this expert advice, ManoMano puts clients in touch with a helping hand who helps them achieve their DIY projects.
Started in 2013, ManoMano grew from 0 to 1,000+ employees, and in such a fast-growing environment, managing the engineering team is a key challenge.
In this story, you’ll learn how Aurélien Rambaux, craftsman coach at ManoMano, managed to leverage the engineering teams’ best coding practices.
Key takeaways
Why Packmind
ManoMano had 300 developers in 40 different feature teams. Packmind helps them leverage their expertise.Benefits
- Packmind works right from the IDE;
- Each developer highlights code snippets and starts discussions;
- These best coding practices live in a unique source of truth, shared across teams.
Impact
- Company-level shared best coding practices;
- Productive code reviews;
- Higher commitment.
Packmind helps the team share in a really efficient way best practices that each one bring from his own experience. It helps us thrive by leveraging the team’s best knowledge.
Challenge: help 300 developers in 40 engineering teams leverage their expertise to ship quality code fast
Meet Aurélien Rambaux. He’s a craftsman coach at ManoMano. Previously at OCTO Technology, an IT consulting company, he joined the unicorn in 2019 to push software craftsmanship. His mission? To help developers thrive by leveraging the teams’ best coding practices. ManoMano had 300 developers in 40 different feature teams. A scrum master was dedicated to at most 2 feature teams, and they were supported by 5 agile coaches. At that time, Aurélien was the only technical coach. “The average skill level was quite good, with knowledge in various domains — DDD, issue management, performances… However, it was heterogeneous among teams,” Aurélien said. His challenge: To help multiple engineering teams leverage their expertise simultaneously.Looking for a simple solution, embraced by developers and scalable
To succeed in his mission, Aurélien knew he needed adoption from the teams. He was looking for a simple solution, in a short, regular format that doesn’t need any specific prep upstream. He started setting up retrospectives, a 2-hour long monthly meeting to review what worked well during sprints and discuss best coding practices. Aurélien quickly realized that such meetings were hard to maintain with 3+ teams, and most of the takeaways ended up in outdated wikis. Then, he met Packmind.Solution: a hub of best coding practices, shared across teams, right from the IDE
Packmind works right from the IDE. Each developer can identify best practices and suggest them to their team. These best coding practices live in a community hub, a unique source-of-truth, shared across teams. In addition, Aurélien set up craft workshops. “Craft workshops don’t replace code reviews, nor trainings. We still have mob programming sessions. Craft workshops are one more routine we set up to define and share best practices,” he explained.Works for every engineering team of any level, for every use cases
He experimented with Packmind with 4 teams that had different setups and use cases:- A team made of 4 senior full-stack developers;
- A team of 6 back-end (Java) developers, intermediate to senior;
- A guild of 8 front-end developers from 6 different teams working on the same repository;
- A team of 3 developers that wanted to explore a new technology (Kotlin).