x-labs in action

A progress report after our first quarter of the x-labs system of coaching and community

At afrolabs, we enjoy creating. We have this privilege because we create the world we want to live in. We do this both in our ways of working and the impact that our products create in the world.

Early in 2022 we began to conceptualise a way of sharing the world we have created with more startup teams, in a trusted, closed community of startups.

We called this system x-labs.

Leaders at organisations close to us were curious to try it out, and we had our first cohort in the second quarter of 2022.

This post is:

• a review of x-labs Theory and Plan, and

• a progress report (with numbers) on how the quarter went

x-labs Theory

We believe that startup teams operating in a shared system of continuous improvement provides:

the best approach to improving the engineering function within a startup.

This is achieved by adding value to each individual and team through coaching and community exchanges where members learn and contribute based on their differences in practice.

We believe that high-functioning engineering leads to business value for the start-up:

• Smoother and faster flow of value delivery, because:

  • systems improve based on learning

  • individual behaviour changes with higher engagement

• Lower cost of talent acquisition, because of:

  • reduced costs in recruiting

  • longer retention of engineers, including leadership

We believe that this is a better investment for a start-up than growing the team head-count by 20%.

Historical validation

This approach has evolved and been used implicitly internally at afrolabs for 18 years, along the way learning what fails and what works, in helping to create tech for over 80 startups since 2004.

It was further refined in David’s work helping to grow the engineering organisation at Yoco through their hyper-growth stage after raising R1.25Bn (a huge number locally, by comparison, our entire start-up tech ecosystem disclosed fund-raising of R1.20 Bn in total the year before).

At Yoco systems of community organisation were created to remain connected to each other, the work, and the joy of creating across multiple teams and “tribes” facilitating the flow of connection, learning and contribution as they grew from 30-130 engineers. This unlocked massive value for the participants, teams and the business.

We were excited to see if we could replicate this across teams in multiple companies.

Plan

In order to implement the vision, we developed the x-labs system of coaching and community.

This system operates at four levels:

• Community: Facilitated open space community, with remote sessions and shared slack

• Learning: Individual goal-setting, training budgets, and participation in learning groups

• Team growth: Team sessions and facilitation of the hexagon-model needs actualisation

• Organisation: An outcome-focused coaching intervention beyond the team

Across these levels, we give attention to the hexagon of needs of a team, to meet those needs and in so doing enable the teams to do their best work.

Progress in numbers

Participants

Over the 3 months, 24 engineers employed across 3 different companies, on 5-7 products, were involved in the x-labs system of learning and contributing.

Process

Weekly Open-Space-Time

We reserved 2 hours per week for open spaces, show and tells, and reflection, with the goal of creating interconnections as a large group.

• We had 7 pure open spaces, with 38 topics proposed and discussed. Topics ranged across the whole hexagon of needs (Product, Organisation, Collective, Growth, Infrastructure, Tech Stack) and beyond.

• We had 3 x-org show and tells (one per month), with a total of 17 presentations shared.

• one hybrid open/space x-org retro looking at improving our system

• For the Miro Geeks, we created a total of 685 objects (stickies, screenshots, links) and maxed out the Miro table rows! Each object is ~= a concept shared.

Responding to change, based on community feedback, we:

• moved the timeslot to a Thursday afternoon to accommodate work schedules

• added another evening learning & gaming hour to allow a more relaxed time for group activities

Individual and organisation growth

• Afrolabs leadership (Georgia, Richard and David) had 40+ 1:1s with participants to reflect and bring awareness at the individual level and assist in individual and team goal-setting

• Goals were set across the x-labs goals board at an individual, learning group, company practice and company initiative level. There were 17 learning or practice improvement goals documented, with progress made on all of them.

• On top of this achievements were unlocked through completing coursework, learning groups and open spaces that were unfortunately not documented.

Packaging

Initially, we packaged it all in one offering for a team of 5, with all levels included. This worked, especially to bootstrap the community.

Now that the core system is up and running, to allow for scalability, based on what we have learned we have refined this offering into tiers.

The new membership levels reflect moving up through the four levels of Community, Individual, Team and Organisation.

What next?

We have kicked off our second quarter with an open-space theme of:

continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.

We’re also open to new community members now, so if you’re at an impact startup, growing your team and engineering culture, we’d love to have you join us.

It’s an exciting time for us as we learn how this works and would love to explore together with our greater community, please do engage, drop us a line, comment, like, and subscribe ;)