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 :)
For context, my answers are in regards to growing companies versus those past that stage that now get more value from focusing on pure optimizations. I’ve found that approaches which work for the latter actually hurts growing companies and vice versa.
In my experience splitting into teams of 6-8 people and then assigning focus areas to teams works fairly well. Assuming you split in a way where teams are not blocking each other the vast majority of the time.
I was thinking more of business metrics which may or may not tie into vision. What metrics does the business care about (customers, revenue per customer, customer sentiment, fraud reports, etc.) and why do you think each team helps those metrics? A team may be supporting other teams but otherwise they should be pushing forward some business metric you care about and are measuring. If you’re not measuring it then how do you know the business is actually doing better or worse in an area (or that a team is helping)?