Joyfully: the Joyous way of working

Joyfully helps product development teams align to create a streamlined organizational structure, form a product strategy, and deliver meaningful chunks of work. It provides a thought provoking alternative to Agile Scrum, Shape Up and other methodologies.

Download the PDF Read it online

The major parts of Joyfully

Joyfully is divided into three major parts:

• Strategy & alignment
• Relationship & team structure
• Our process for defining, designing and building features

Joyfully is not perfect, nor finished, but it is working well for us. Where we have ended up is quite different from other ways of working.

Our hope is that you might include parts of what we do as you shape your own way of working. We want more product teams to codify and share their ways of working. Not only will this benefit your own team, but others too.

Ruby Kolesky and Kevin Norris

Reviews

“We love the Joyous approach! We’ve adopted and adapted many aspects of their way of working and it’s already proven to be super valuable. By expanding my role from product designer to ‘full stack product’ I now have a deeper understanding of our customers, product and the business, which has helped shape our product for the better.”
— Ruth Hocking, Senior Product Manager, Runn.io

“Joyfully is a very thoughtful, creative approach to designing a product / engineering culture. Recommended reading for any small product / engineering team seeking to improve their development practice and culture. Whether or not the details of this methodology are right for you, Joyfully will inspire you to be more thoughtful and intentional in your own team practice.”
— Jeremy Ginsberg, CTO in Residence, Movac

April 14 2022

TERRITORY 3: KIWI LANDING PAD REIMAGINED Kevin Norris and Ruby Kolesky give an overview of Joyfully for founders on this recorded webinar from T3.

March 9 2022

PRODUCT TANK AUCKLAND Hear from Ruby Kolesky and Chris Holdaway, co-creators of a new way of working for product folks, called Full Stack Product.

February 23 2022

AGILE AUCKLAND 2.0 If you are struggling to get aligned around building the right thing, and your current way of working doesn’t feel effective, then catch the discussion from Agile Auckland with Ruby Kolesky and Kevin Norris talking about Joyfully.

April 28 2022

DIGITAL DEBRIEF Ruby Kolesky talks to Ben Rose about Joyfully and how we work at Joyous. Including our approach to strategic alignment, our organisational structure, learning and growth, partnering with customers, and more.

Read Joyfully online

Introduction
Over the last year, we have come up with our own way of working at Joyous. We call it working Joyfully.

Our Joyful Principles
These principles underpin how we work together at Joyous.

Product Strategy
In this chapter we clarify why you need a product strategy, and walk you through the 10 steps we took to form one.

Strategic Alignment & The Negative Roadmap
This chapter of Joyfully describes how we achieve 100% alignment between our senior leaders using both positive and negative roadmaps.

Unified Engineering
At Joyous, all engineers are part of a single team. With Unified Engineering we achieve our goals with a smaller and more efficient team.

Our Organisational Structure
At Joyous people learn more, faster, than they could elsewhere. Three key factors enable this: collective leadership, partnerships, and roles with broad capabilities.

The Product & Engineering Partnership
A strong bond and mutual trust between product and engineering teams is rare. Combine this with strong competency and a good product strategy - and you have a recipe for success.

Full Stack Product
Using our full stack product approach we combine nine roles from product, design and customer care into one person.

Engineering Crews
We developed the concept of Crews to maintain efficiency with more engineers. Crews are designed to maintain the benefits of unified engineering while scaling.

Define, Design & Build Features Overview
Developing Joyfully is an on-going and organic process. The process we describe here is the process we follow most often.

Carve Into Chunks
These are the steps we take to carve objectives into smaller chunks.

Frame Features
Learn about our design tools, design system and how we structure our design projects and files in Figma.

Design Solution
Learn how we go from empty frames to initial designs.

Asynchronous Feedback
Asynchronous collaboration occurs in Figma using the comments functionality.

Mammoth Meetings
We invite the entire organisation to join us for a one hour decision making meeting.

Joy Mapping
The purpose of Joy Mapping is to achieve clarity and alignment on what the crew will build.

Group Architecture
Taking a collaborative approach to solving these problems has huge positive outcomes.

Build
We've reached the point where a chunk of work is ready to build.

Ship
Shipping a large feature, or major release involves many important considerations.

References and thanks
A list of people and things we are thankful for.

Try our new HR Engagement Model informed by Amy Edmondson and Mark Mortensen's latest research.
Learn more