How fudge candies catalysed feedback and engagement

This is a story about building appreciation and feedforward culture in the organization. I am going to talk about a bottom-up experiment based on Jurgen Appelo's Merit Money, conduced in the biggest e-commerce company in Poland - Allegro Group. It is a story about learning throughout an Agile experiment to get the most out of it. Primarily the experiment was intended to challenge the existing bonus system based on forced ranking. It turned into appreciation and feedback system with some sweets involved. This feedback system has grown to more that 230 people involved from 3 different physical locations and still grows virally. We made a structure in which there is a coordinator in each location. If at least part of scrum team plays the game, SM is the first line contact. He distributes credits and exchanges them for sweets. Also cooperates with coordinator who is responsible for making sure system works well in his location. Iterations are now 2 weeks. We introduced a requirement that credit has to be filled in with short description what you thank for, in order to be exchanged. This was to promote written thank you’s and avoid situations where people hand over credits just to get sweets. Also every quarter we change credits appearance so that the previous credits cannot be exchanged for sweets. This is to set a time box and “flush the system”.