Agile development when building the best digital rental apartment

agency in Sweden

Olle Bergdahl, E-strategist

Executive office, City of Uppsala

9 November, 2016

Topics

• The mission

• Strategies when recruiting the team

• Design principles

• Conscious risk-taking

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My mission:Building the best digital rental apartment agency in Sweden

within…

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…6 months!

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Uppsala Rental apartment agency

• Owns no property

• Real Estate broker specialized to match offer and demand

• Transparent

• Easy and trustful way to get a rental apartment agreement

• Financed by fees

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It is all about the team

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The dream team characteristics

• Self oriented team

• Focus on collaboration and problem solving

• Mixed competences

• High commitment

• No divas!

Motto: Working hard and have fun!

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My dream team

• Back end developers

• Front end developers

• UX designers

• Web designer

• Scrum master

• Product owner

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Competency Based Interviews

• Selection process for experienced recruitment

• Suitable when it is hard to select on the basis of technical merit

• Key competencies

• Teamwork

• Responsibility

• Decision making

• Communication

• Trustworthiness and ethics

• Result orientation

• Problem solving

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Design principles

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Design principles

• Start with needs

• Do less

• Design with data

• Do the hard work to make it simple

• Iterate. Then iterate again.

• This is for everyone

• Understand context

• Build digital services, not websites

• Be consistent, not uniform

• Make things open: it makes things better

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Conscious risk-taking

• Scrum

• Incremental delivery

• Invite all stakeholders including steering committee to demos

• Create awareness around the method

• Demand decisions makers to be active in prioritization

• Put people before processes. Never talk about resources, talk about people instead!

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The result!

• + 50 000 registered users

• 15 000 visits per week

• 37 000 revisited

• Easy to use!

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THANK YOU!

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