January 2023, our product team (already deprived of a Quality Analyst) sees the departure of its Product Manager who, for budgetary reasons, cannot temporarily be replaced. As is often the case in IT, this “temporarily” will continue, for almost a year.

Taking responsibility for a new bug-prone scope already displaying no less than 70 open bug tickets, we weathered a real storm to end the year with almost no open bug tickets while continuously delivering new essential features.

During this presentation, I tell you how each member of the team went beyond the scope of their role to compensate for the absences of Product Manager and Quality Analyst. How each person developed new skills to create real resilience despite the limited number of 3 developers and ensure knowledge sharing such that very quickly, no one was essential anymore. We beat the bus factor, continually improved our processes, and created an environment of psychological safety and innovation.

It is the story of a team which, while it had all the ingredients to fail, was on the contrary able to build itself against all odds thanks to agility and psychological safety.

Feedback on how a product team without a Product Manager or Quality Analyst managed, over a year, to deliver key features while facing hundreds of bugs.