3 ms·

At an old team of mine at Amazon we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so. They were in charge of getting the right peop

• morelisp 4y ago
  > we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so... took maybe a day of time per week The problem is if you are having a struggling team, it takes a lot more of a day of time and requires a lot more maturity than just leaving jira comments and sending meeting invites. But if you put your devs who are good at structuring problems/time on it, now they're participating in the actual development less, so the team gets even less functional (at best temporarily, at worst you're now in a death spiral). Furthermore if the root problem is not really the organizing but more fundamental (poor skills / skill alignment, understaffing, chaos agent, etc) the singular dev will rarely have the ability to deal with it and can even start drawing animosity. Having a separate person responsible for this, in a different hierarchy with different ears, can be a lot more effective in these situations. (It can also make it worse, if the separate person is also shit at their job, has too much work, has very different attitudes towards work than the rest of the team, ...) tl;dr: If your team is functional pretty much anything will work, these structures also need to be judged by how well they can get it back on track from non-functional.