🧬 Work in Progress: The Missing Agile Ceremony That Scaled My Engineering Team Without Bottlenecks

Engineering organizations at scale struggle with maintaining healthy collaboration, knowledge sharing, and sustainable velocity. Standups are great for surfacing blockers quickly but don’t provide space to discuss technical details. Story grooming sessions focus on the business impact and motivation behind work, allowing implementation details to emerge later when the story is picked up. Sprint demos are effective at getting working software in front of users to gather feedback on whether the right thing is being built, often intentionally overlooking whether it was built right. Retrospectives create moments of reflection that often surface opportunities for technical alignment, but the feedback they provide can be delayed. What if there was a lightweight, scalable ritual to surface technical detail, encourage mentorship, and foster asynchronous learning — without adding overhead?

Enter Work in Progress (WIP) sessions, a simple but powerful ceremony that transformed how I led over 50 engineers at Microsoft, enabling us to scale knowledge sharing, reduce silos, and minimize bottlenecks.

What Are Work in Progress Sessions?

WIP sessions are no-prep, informal show-and-tells where engineers share technical details about their current work. These sessions are:

  • Lightweight: No slides, no presentations, just a candid walkthrough of what you’re working on.
  • Technical: A space to dig into the how and why, from code patterns to tradeoffs.
  • Collaborative: Opportunities for feedback and collective learning.
  • Inclusive: Everyone gets a chance to share and listen.

The intention is to share knowledge, learn together, and grow as a team.

Why WIP Sessions Work

1. Surface Hidden Insights

In large teams, many technical decisions happen in silos. WIP sessions bring those stories into the open. Engineers share their mental models, patterns, and even their struggles — turning technical debt into a strategic tool rather than a silent liability.

2. Normalize Technical Debt Discussions

Rather than treating technical debt as a dirty word, WIP sessions frame it as a manageable tradeoff. This mindset shift encourages faster iteration, with the shared understanding that the debt will be “paid back” intentionally.

3. Build Mentorship & Trust

WIP fosters a culture of openness. Junior engineers get to see senior engineers’ thought processes, while senior engineers gain visibility into what junior team members are working on. This mutual exchange accelerates mentorship and raises the whole team’s technical bar.

4. Create Async Knowledge Flows

Recording and sharing summaries or notes from WIP sessions helps create a repository of team knowledge. This supports asynchronous learning, ideal for distributed teams or different time zones.

How I Led 50+ Engineers Through WIP

Running WIP sessions at scale requires attention beyond just scheduling meetings. Here’s how I made it work:

  • Regular Cadence: Weekly or bi-weekly sessions to keep momentum.
  • Balanced Participation: Tracked who presented and from which teams to ensure broad representation and avoid silos.
  • Demand vs Supply: Monitored how many engineers wanted to present vs. how many actually did, to identify barriers and adjust.
  • Adaptive Format: Iterated on the session format based on feedback — shorter slots, focused topics, or open Q&A.
  • Surface Key Insights: Highlighted recurring themes or challenges for leadership visibility and follow-up.

Why You Should Consider Adding WIP

If your team struggles with:

  • Knowledge silos or communication bottlenecks
  • Lack of technical mentorship or shared learning
  • Difficulty balancing speed and code quality

…then Work in Progress sessions may be the missing ceremony you never knew you needed.

They’re easy to adopt, low overhead, and produce outsized impact on engineering health and scale.

Final Thoughts

Scaling an engineering org isn’t just about processes or tools—it’s about culture and communication. The WIP ceremony unlocked a new channel for engineers to connect, mentor, and learn from each other in a sustainable, scalable way.

If your team hasn’t tried it yet, give it a shot. Sometimes, the simplest rituals create the biggest breakthroughs.

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