Enabling teams to drive their own productivity improvements | Jenny McClain (Toast)
Aug 16, 2023
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Jenny McClain, Leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast, discusses how her team enables individual teams at Toast to drive their productivity improvements. They cover topics such as team embedding, learning resources, staying connected with teams at scale, and the enablement function as a career path.
Jenny's R&D Enablement team focuses on providing learning resources and support to empower teams to drive their own productivity improvements.
Jenny emphasizes the importance of community-driven enablement, facilitating conversations between teams and promoting peer learning to foster continuous improvement.
Deep dives
The Role of R&D Enablement at Toast
Jenny McLean, who leads R&D Enablement at Toast, shares insights on how to drive productivity improvements for teams. The R&D enablement team focuses on learning and providing building blocks for high-performing teams. Jenny discusses the genesis of the enablement team and how it evolved to meet the growing needs of the organization. She emphasizes the importance of team health and continuous improvement, sharing examples of playbooks and resources created to support teams at different stages of development. The enablement team curates internal best practices and also links to external resources to provide a well-rounded learning experience.
Creating and Maintaining a Team Health Toolkit
Jenny explains how she embeds with different teams to understand their challenges and document their innovative practices. By observing team dynamics and reviewing documentation, she distills complex processes into simple, digestible practices. Jenny curates these practices in the team health toolkit, organized by team maturity and product maturity. She emphasizes the role of marketing in effectively communicating the available resources to teams. Additionally, she discusses the importance of community-driven enablement, facilitating conversations between teams, and promoting peer learning.
Connecting Teams and Leveraging Metrics
Jenny highlights the role of metrics and surveys in determining areas of improvement for teams. She leverages developer experience surveys and team health metrics to identify teams excelling in specific areas. These high-performing teams are connected with those seeking improvement in the same areas. Jenny emphasizes the importance of targeted resource distribution and community conversations to spur learning and improvement. She shares examples of how teams collaborate and mentor each other to drive continuous learning and development.
Opportunities for Growth in the Enablement Role
Jenny discusses the growth potential within the enablement role, citing potential paths such as senior operational roles, product management, people development, and coaching. She emphasizes the balance between delivering iterative value and pursuing transformational ideas. Jenny also highlights the value of patience and urgency in achieving long-term impact on an organization's culture.
This week’s guest is Jenny McClain, who leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast. Jenny’s team focuses on enabling individual teams at Toast to drive their own productivity improvements, and this conversation dives into how they tackle this problem.
Discussion points:
(1:19) How the R&D Enablement team works
(2:50) Why the team was formed
(4:31) The types of work the team focuses on
(7:31) Identifying the problems this team would solve
(11:23) How team embeds work
(17:19) The learning resources the team develops and maintains
(20:55) Who creates and maintains the learning resources
(23:10) How enablement stays connected with teams at scale
(25:51) How the team plans work with qualitative and quantitative measures
(29:37) Formats for sharing knowledge between teams
(33:05) How other companies can think about the enablement function