ENGINEERING
Growing the Team
Optimizing Team Structure
As the team grows, restructure it into specialized sub-teams to enhance focus, collaboration, and accountability. Each team can take ownership of specific features, services, or areas of the product.
Why it's Important
Prevents bottlenecks and inefficiencies in workflows.
Clarifies responsibilities and ownership for team members.
Facilitates focused expertise in different areas of the product.
How to Implement
Evaluate the team’s current workloads and identify natural divisions of responsibility.
Create sub-teams or pods focused on specific areas, such as backend, frontend, or DevOps.
Assign team leads or senior members to oversee sub-teams.
Establish cross-team communication channels to maintain alignment.
Use AI tools to monitor workload distribution and identify imbalances.
Available Workshops
Team Mapping Workshop: Analyze current roles and responsibilities to identify areas for specialization.
Leadership Development Session: Train potential leads for new sub-teams.
Collaboration and Handoff Workshop: Define processes for cross-team collaboration and handoffs.
Load Balancing Simulation: Test team structures to ensure workloads are evenly distributed.
Goal Alignment Session: Ensure all sub-teams align with overall product and company goals.
Deliverables
Clear team structures with assigned responsibilities.
Defined communication processes between teams.
Leadership roles with responsibilities documented.
How to Measure
Reduction in project bottlenecks and delays.
Team satisfaction surveys regarding workload and structure.
Improved velocity and quality metrics for sub-teams.
Real-World Examples
Spotify
Developed a "squad" structure where teams focused on specific features or services.
Encouraged small, autonomous teams to innovate within clear guardrails.
Shopify
Organized teams around themes, like merchant success or scalability.
Get It Right
Clearly define team responsibilities and areas of ownership.
Foster collaboration through cross-team communication processes.
Empower team leads to make decisions and manage workloads.
Regularly reassess structures as the team grows or priorities shift.
Use tools to monitor and balance workloads across teams.
Don't Make These Mistakes
Creating too many silos, leading to communication breakdowns.
Overloading certain teams while others are underutilized.
Failing to define clear responsibilities and ownership.
Ignoring team feedback on structure effectiveness.
Allowing sub-teams to drift out of alignment with company goals.
Provided courtesy of Tricia Ballad, Tech Leader
Disentangled Tech