How Doodle Improved its Competitive Edge through Continuous Improvement

The Brief

Since its launch in 2007, Doodle has achieved its market position through its continuous improvement approach. To further grow its share, Doodle brought Lean Agile Intelligence (LAI) into its existing initiatives to learn where it should focus next. With the insights taken from LAI’s platform, Doodle found a new area of improvement, one that was unexpected yet impactful.

Doodle has long relied on its ability to innovate, as it first defined and then defended its market segment. With over 30 million active users per month (MAUs), Doodle allows its users and customers to collaborate by finding meeting times that work for everyone—whether meeting with one or a group. While Doodle has enjoyed being a leading scheduling tool, it increasingly felt the competition from fast followers. Recognizing the need to stay ahead, Doodle prioritized team agility and continuous improvement. 

Continuous Improvement: Behind Doodle’s Competitive Edge

Doodle’s development teams needed to develop features faster to maintain its market advantage. The teams used a mix of Scrum and Kanban, an approach to team agility crucial in responding quickly to market demands.  And, like many organizations using agile practices—at the team level or otherwise—Doodle didn't treat its agile transformation as a single event or an initiative worth doing only until it hit a particular outcome or state, but instead as a continuous activity.

As part of that “Improvement is a journey, not a destination” culture, Doodle’s continuous improvement initiative embodies the idea of Kaizen. Since CEO Renato Profico joined the company in 2019, Doodle has worked hard to foster that environment of continuous improvement. Everyone is included in this environment, from senior leadership to a core team of Engineering and Delivery Managers dedicated to each development team. They are the main change agents that foster the environment with continuous improvement and Kaizen.

Team Agility and Lean Agile Intelligence 

After the first rounds of self-directed improvement, CTO Jens Naie and Director of Business Agility Tim Yevgrashyn turned to Lean Agile Intelligence to help identify additional and advanced practices to focus on and create an improvement plan. This step enhanced team agility and ensured all teams aligned with Doodle’s overall strategy. 

Jens said: “As a CTO, I'm more interested in flight level 3, which assumes everything works well on the team level. So I needed to know how healthy teams act and ensure they align and improve constantly.”

“...I needed to know how healthy teams act and ensure they align and improve constantly.” - Doodle CTO Jens Naie

The Results

Using LAI unlocked powerful insights, particularly how Doodle can enhance team agility by streamlining processes. After assessing processes and having many conversations, Doodle realized that it needed to implement a portfolio Kanban to better help move work from the portfolio level into the team and task levels.

The results from Doodle’s first LAI assessment showed that all teams have low scores in the "value-driven" dimension. This insight led to discussions about transparency and internal alignment, especially in the top company vision and initiatives flow. That resulted in establishing a portfolio flow for initiatives, an essential aspect of maintaining team agility and continuous improvement.

Today, every user story and task in progress is connected to an initiative with top priority and company focus.

CEO Renato Profico reminds the team,  "If you don't see how your current work is connected to the company strategy, please stop immediately and talk to someone, including me."

"If you don't see how your current work is connected to the company strategy, please stop immediately and talk to someone, including me". - Doodle CEO Renato Profico

Enabling the Team through Portfolio Practices

Focusing on the flow at the portfolio level was only possible once the team understood that they did everything they could to self-optimize and needed support from the system. To optimize the system overall, the teams needed to be clear on the portfolio items as they entered the queue and prioritized them for development. Adopting lean portfolio practices, including Kanban, was their way forward.

The workflow became transparent once the portfolio Kanban system was in place. It allowed the top management and team members to inform each other about the potential costs and benefits of the work as they entered the system. 

This cross-functional collaboration ultimately allowed Doodle to focus on only the highest-value work as a function of time, effort, and benefit. This value-based prioritization empowered Doodle to become more competitive in an increasingly crowded market—a testament to continuous improvement practices.

Wrapping Up

Because of the LAI environment, Doodle increased its competitive advantage as it discovered the importance of improving its systems. By beginning with agile practices at the team level, it was able to better prioritize items that teams work on individually while learning that the portfolio needed to evolve as it informed the teams’ work, all of which created a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. This approach, deeply rooted in Kaizen, allowed Doodle to maintain team agility and optimize portfolio flow.

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