Hike is a new kind of a messaging app that is changing the way people connect with one another and simplifying the way they interact with content and services on mobile.

At 100 million users exchanging 40 billion messages/month (Jan'16), and growing each day, Hike is working at a scale that no other Indian internet company today is. The key to Hike's hyper growth has been its ability to continuously re-organize itself and build a self-learning culture, something they continue to evolve and better everyday.

Driving autonomy, alignment to Hike's mission, imbibing the internal culture and values, were all fundamental to this continuous change. Hear Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger share his story on how he is building a self-learning organization and the role Agile plays in it.

- Over 15M users India is a very different place.
- You can organize small, 15 ppl company top down, but not when you already have 40 ppl.
- They have not noticed that their application is very slow on GPRS/2G networks and old phones and back then that was the majority of the market.
- Squads - PO (Product Owner) - A Squad is a cross-functional team that can operate independently insidethe company. They created 4 squads.
- The browser and the TAB has replaced the shrinkwrap applications on Desktop. On mobile we still install individual apps for everything.
- Now they hae 250 in 12 squads
- The problem with squads is that they optimize for local maximum. They don't communicate among themselves.
- Chapters are horizontal group: Design chapter, Android Chapter.
- Each chapter has weekly meetings talking about what they were building. That helps reduce duplication and increases cooperation between squads for code reuse and for APIs.
- The PO of each squad is a mini-entrepreneur. The Chapter leader of each chapter is like a mini-professor.
- Squaads themselves become siloed teams. Chapters solved the problem.
- Teams need Autonomy and Alignment
- Squadify ???
- 100 M+ users, 40B messages / month, 120 min / week inside the application

### Hike Core value (explained at 44:00)

1. Maniacal abour our mission
2. Obsess to deliver Wow
3. Solve for the User first
4. Autonomy and ownership
5. Obsess over metrics
6. unreasonably high-bar on people
7. Individual mastery
8. Fierce sense of urgency
9. Questions Status Quo
10. Company > Team > Self
11. Make memories and have fun

- Intuition does not scale
- How to validate the problem and solution in the cheapest way? User research and prototyping.
- If we build it, doesn't mean we're going to ship it. So be careful about what you build.
- Code is a liabilituy. The less code you have, the better.
- De-risk: Don't waste time building crap.