Discovery week (announcement)¶
A couple of weeks ago, the Ardennes-etape Digital team organized its first « discovery week ». One whole week where all projects and bugs, except for emergencies, obviously, were paused and where all the team members were able to discover...
The objective was to spend time, together or alone, on a topic that was somehow related to our daily work, but that is too complex or time consuming to tackle within our regular sprints...
Part of the team spent time getting up to speed with tools like Figma or, more generally, good UX practices (thanks Pedro).
Others dove into the hot topic of the moment, ie AI, and played around with ChatGPT, LangChain... Even though this was absolutely not required, they came up with very interesting proofs of concepts that will soon help everybody within the company to be more efficient.
Other research topics were Machine Learning, Docker, ElasticSearch, CI, pact.io (interface testing), latest NextJs release etc.
At the end of the week, time was spent to show and discuss our findings.
As mentioned, this was our first « discovery week »... It was itself a proof of concept we heard about from other tech companies, but that needed to be tested and validated at Ardennes-étape...
Conclusions:
- the whole team was able to take some time off from the daily business while remaining productive
- some excellent new skills were acquired
- time for some fresh tech-air does feel good
- and, although not required, some interesting, almost prod-ready, proof of concepts...
So overall the discovery week was a great success and everybody agrees this should be repeated, once every four months, aligned with our OKR cycle...