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Jason Yip shares his observations for scaling software teams during hyper growth (and what not to do). I liked his insight on group structure alignment with the
by absolute100 5y ago
Jason Yip shares his observations for scaling software teams during hyper growth (and what not to do). I liked his insight on group structure alignment with the stability of the group's strategy: "Structure should be stable where strategy is stable; structure should be flexible where strategy is volatile. For example, if a broader department-level product strategy is stable while more local tactics are volatile, you should want the structure and shared identity of the department to be stronger and more stable than team-level structures and identities."
- jasonpeacock 5y agoSo...Conway's Law :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law There is also the "reverse-Conway maneuver": Structure the org to produce the results you want.
- msandford 5y agoI love the idea of the reverse Conway maneuver. Thanks for that. Obvious in hindsight.
- hinkley 5y agoI haven’t gotten to use it much, but it does seem to work for network services as well. But then it’s a fine line between reverse Conway and Gandhi (be the change). You can stand up a sane thing that you enjoy interacting with and then maneuver to have the org and systems match that new structure.
- muzani 5y agoIMO you should always engineer the organization chart before the architecture. If a major goal is to sell ads, that should reflect in both org and tech.
- jameshart 5y agoBut there's also a danger: if the only tool leadership can think of to affect how things get done is to redraw the org chart, you get management-through-reverse-Conway. There are other ways to tell people how to behave than shifting their reporting lines, but some leaders haven't heard of them.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoYeah, completely agreed. I actually like the strategy outlined in the OP (Absorb and Split). When this has happened, it's always lead to a much better outcome than when you start splitting and creating teams prematurely.