It's a bad idea when the slices aren't independently achievable. The military analog is the fire team (3-4 ppl) or the squad (5-14 ppl), depending on how hungr

It's a bad idea when the slices aren't independently achievable. The military analog is the fire team (3-4 ppl) or the squad (5-14 ppl), depending on how hungry they are and what the current theater demands. Squads can be assigned multiple discreetly accomplishable objectives. Each squad is assigned to secure a different building on a street, for example. No one squad is necessarily codependent on the success of the other squads to meet it's own objective, but when you pull back a level, overall organizational success (securing the neighborhood, winning the fight in the city, winning the war) is dependent on the success of all of the squads. The article argues, and I agree, that as a company grows, it's easy to shift from discrete squads to assembly line squads. Eg data ingestion => data transformation => data delivery. Platoon / company level objectives, not squad level ones. I have the analogies, but not necessarily and better solutions.