I think this is a struggle for many of us. Not only to re-organise existing teams but also positioning teams in a larger organisation. What team composition works for your cases? What roles are filled within a software development team, and what roles run across teams? What kind of teams are there?

I’ve applied teamtopologies and unfix to help communicate about our team structures, but I’m curious about what problems people encounter and what solutions you’ve discovered.

Some challenges I’ve been facing:

  • Finding or training security officers
  • Organising IT operators
  • Dealing with access control and compliance
  • 24-7 Coverage
  • Keeping Data Scientists productive
  • Avoiding superheroes
  • front-end and back-end teams
  • dedicated testers
  • The role of QA and Product

I’m curious to see a discussion :)

  • valence_engineer@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I feel trying to structure everything “perfectly” is just micro-management and is never going to be close to “perfect” for the usual reasons top-down everything never is. My general thoughts are:

    • Employees should feel they are achieving autonomy, mastery and purpose. They’ll work out all the details themselves if they’re motivated and empowered to do so.
    • To that effect teams should be able to do their end-to-end work without being blocked by/dependent on other teams 80% of the time. Not for 80% of each piece of work but 80% of pieces of work they put into production.
    • The vision of the company/department and what rough path is being taken towards that vision (metrics, projects, goals, etc.) should be crystal clear to everyone.
    • Incentives (promotions, yearly reviews, bonuses, etc.) at a corporate level should correlate with driving forward business value versus bureaucratic box checking.