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Here’s one point I find helpful (particularly if you’re a director-level thinking of restructuring this way.) If you don’t have the utmost confidence that your
by jimberlage 3y ago
Here’s one point I find helpful (particularly if you’re a director-level thinking of restructuring this way.) If you don’t have the utmost confidence that your entry-level managers can hire/have hired a balance of people to effectively take on the responsibilities of a stream-enabled team, you’re not ready to work this way.
A team of backend specialists will really struggle if they are suddenly given complex frontend work, and vice-versa. Plus, if you typically have teams of -4 engineers, that means that even one person being out can be catastrophic to your team’s balance. Or if you pick up a project that suddenly increases a specialist burden, you have to find the right enablement team or move people around the org. Expect that to happen often (perhaps even quarterly?) depending on your stream and product team.
You can also hire fullstack, but beware that they need to be truly fullstack in a way that is really rare. It will probably require a bigger salary commitment across your teams.
- jimberlage 3y agoAnother risk is that your platform teams need to be super good at identifying each stream team’s roadmap. If the way aren’t and your product team doesn’t naturally identify overlapping features as areas for technical communication, the platform team needs to fill that gap. And you need 1 platform team that will identify each gap, so a platform team that can’t identify when two web apps can share componentry likely implies the need for a platform team who can. There will be a lot on their plates!
- tines 3y agoDid you ever work at IBM by chance? I ask because it's the only place I've ever heard the word "enablement" used.
- ozr 3y agoThe term is spreading, unfortunately.
- jimberlage 3y agoNope! I do think I picked it up from a boss who spent time at IBM, though. Edit: It's also a misquote from the article, they refer to it as an Enabling Team.