Designing Teams shouldn't be with instincts. Leaders should design frameworks to move their teams and define how they work, evolve, and succeed. While planning the organizational changes, leaders should also create team design rules to set the course of teams. The rules should answer questions like: If two teams...
The most difficult part of facilitating interaction mode is to create an enabling team that consists of experts. Because experts rarely want to work as an enabler. However, I think staff engineers are the perfect solution for being in the enabling team. I actually think that they are a one-person enabling team. Some...
Inverse Conway Maneuver doesn't work alone. Knowing team interaction modes and team types helps us use the Inverse Conway Maneuver to our advantage. As I'm not fully convinced that the Inverse Conway Maneuver will work, I cannot see how it can be implemented. Inverse Conway Maneuver can only work on high levels, and...
For team interaction modes to work, managers have to work on creating the environment and consistently (and sometimes with big-bang changes, sometimes with deliberate actions) work on setting the expectations for the team. The managers should bring clarity and support people in their expected path. For example, if...
Having facilitating team interaction mode should be across the organization. I think Quality Engineering can work in this mode for some organizations for a certain period. They can coach other teams to increase the quality of the software. The same approach can be taken for DevOps to guide teams to improve their...
Creating an X-as-a-service team communication mode has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest con I see is the operational cost of setting the team up. The forming stage requires deliberate actions and doing them consistently in a changing business environment. When the business doesn't think of the platform as a...
I used to think of system design as being formed by technical and communicational patterns. However, everything around software teams and technical infrastructure affects the system design: offices, team distribution, CI/CD, organizational technology standards, and best practices. Even when we want to build...
Organizations mistake collaboration as a good strategy and don't see its side effects. The effect of two teams collaborating on systems is sometimes invisible. Collaboration between two teams can enforce "great teamwork," and leaders can praise this style. Yet, when collaboration is not on purpose, it's more harmful...
Sometimes, it looks like long-term collaboration is necessary between two teams that are both stream-aligned. But it doesn't fit into the collaboration team interaction mode framework (e.g., consumer and provider teams were meeting every week). Any friction between these teams should be avoided (if the goal is not...
When organizations are poorly managed, usually, there is chaos between teams: either more interaction than necessary or no interaction at all where it needs to be. Clearly defining the expected interaction mode will provide clarity, and engineers will understand what is expected from the other team. In return, the...
Platform teams have a lot of organizational work besides designing and coding the platform. Without organizational work, they cannot function well. Organizations have to ensure that platforms' APIs are well-designed and documented. Their consumers should start using the platform without the platform team's input and...
Getting the platform right is difficult because of the product pressure. Once the platform team works efficiently, it's fantastic to have because the team takes a lot of organizational burdens away from stream-aligned teams along with the cognitive load. Documentation is crucial to reduce the synchronous...
