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Designing Engineering Organizations

141 点作者 dochtman超过 4 年前

12 条评论

Noe2097超过 4 年前
This post is interesting only as an example of a total lack of facts, comparisons, and perspective.<p>The lone backing of each opinion is the adverb &quot;generally&quot;. There is no mention of any concrete team&#x2F;company size where issues do&#x2F;might occur in one or the other setup. There is no mention of successful or failing companies adopting one or the other setup.<p>And just to mention a single concrete counter-example to the groundless side taken here, take Apple. Apple&#x27;s organization is _based_ on specialization, for the simple reason that the more specialized teams are, the higher their expertise is. Look at Spotify, Microsoft, and others; they moved away from the simplistic feature-squad model advocated here, because it simply didn&#x27;t scale.<p>Certainly, communication across team members, and communication across teams are subjects of attention. It does not mean it should be ignored&#x2F;avoided. It&#x27;s like saying &quot;scaling horizontally is too difficult, just stick to scaling vertically&quot;; sure, it&#x27;s easier, but the power is not the same.
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choeger超过 4 年前
Written by a product manager, I would presume. This design is optimized for product managers and that&#x27;s it.<p>1. No communication responsibilities. The product manager owns a team for the product and that&#x27;s it.<p>2. Maximal headcount. Need a tenths of a frontend dev? You get one fully for your team!<p>3. No technical understanding required. You just tell the DB guy to &quot;make things happen&quot; via user story. No engineering manager to argue with, no wholistic constraints to consider. Disk space, bandwidth? What is that? May playlist feature <i>needs</i> to store all permutations persistently for performance!<p>The greatest admission is the implicit acknowledgement that product managers <i>cannot</i> work efficiently with teams organized by discipline. In any other industry that is the bread and butter of management: Coordinate and plan with other departments. Here we just eliminate this.<p>And what&#x27;s the outcome? A coherent product? Far from it. You get a bunch of features glued together by a UI no one really owned. These features are not orthogonal and they definitely don&#x27;t compose well. Why? Because to do so the product managers of different teams would have to coordinate between themselves. The very thing they just admitted they cannot do efficiently.
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jasonpeacock超过 4 年前
Team Topologies[0] goes into more depth about this topic, it&#x27;s a good read.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;1942788819" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;1942788819</a>
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ellimilial超过 4 年前
&#x27;This is – to use a technical term – bullcrap.&#x27; It&#x27;s moderately inspiring to read this kind of technical opinion from a technical leader.<p>I have heard similar objections&#x2F;uneasiness concerning delivery-aligned reporting, coming especially from more junior specialists. More so within teams with broader sets of disciplines.<p>In addition to the need of improving their skillset and receiving tailored career guidance, there is sometimes a strong political component.
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0xbadcafebee超过 4 年前
I&#x27;ve read a lot on how other orgs have grown and gone through DevOps transformations, and all of this is echoed in those stories, but it also leaves out other strategies. Would like to see more of a matrix of what strategies are useful in what context and aren&#x27;t in others.<p>In SRE&#x2F;Ops, it seems to work better with two single-disciplinary teams (Builders and Runners) in one department. One team builds systems, another team runs systems. This is because experience leads to efficiency. Scaling a single-disciplinary team <i>(in this context)</i> you get efficiency combined with ability to respond to organizational change. Think of a cabinetmaker versus a chair maker. Or in comparing SW Developer &#x2F; SRE-Builder &#x2F; SRE-Runner, an auto engineer, an auto mechanic, and a racecar driver. They are each efficient at a particular thing because of their experience.<p>But for building and running a product as a whole, you want a multi-disciplinary team to manage the wide range of experience needed to build and run that product. You still rely on outside single-disciplinary teams for things that can be done more efficiently that way. But you can change the product faster&#x2F;better if a core group has a lot of general knowledge about it.<p>The trick is to create feedback loops where these different teams feed information and work streams back into each other constantly. You do this to fight silo-ism, and to reduce friction in the value chain.<p>I think &quot;reporting&quot; is highly overrated. The principle of a self-organizing team is that they will figure out what they need to do. If you start dissolving the &quot;lines&quot; between teams, the organization as a whole will start figuring out what it needs to do. If you think about ecology, this is how natural systems work: there are always boundaries in different parts of an organism, but many of its parts self-determine their actions. Coordination becomes a ballet, not a machine.<p>And what&#x27;s often overlooked is how the larger organization affects the value chain. The higher levels of the organization often set the tone for how work gets done for <i>everyone</i>. But different parts of the org may benefit from radically different working models. Are there proven ways to run different parts of the business in drastically different ways, yet still provide clear workflows for them to operate together efficiently?
lrossi超过 4 年前
&gt; My experience is that it takes at least 6 months to reach the “performing” level, and sometimes much more. If staff switch teams more often than that, teams never reach their full potential.<p>On one hand, I agree with this, as I have been moved quickly between projects in the past, when I was more needed elsewhere. It helped to keep things interesting but I would have liked more stability.<p>On the other hand, there is a risk that people get stuck in one place for a while with no mobility, working on something they don’t like. I have seen this as well. Good people weren’t allowed to move, so they quit. As the team was shrinking, the others had to stay. Needless to say that morale was poor.<p>There is a fine line between the two.
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contingencies超过 4 年前
You don&#x27;t <i>design</i> an organization, you <i>grow</i> an organization.
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jschwartzi超过 4 年前
Generally, you should do what makes sense for your organization regardless of what other organizations are doing.
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ramenmeal超过 4 年前
I assume this is based purely from his experience. I wonder how much research has been done on this. Surely Microsoft has tried to do some studies on it?
jasonpeacock超过 4 年前
No discussion of Conway&#x27;s Law is complete without mentioning the Inverse (or Reverse) Conway Maneuver[0] - knowing that architecture follows org structure, you structure your org to deliver the desired architecture.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thoughtworks.com&#x2F;radar&#x2F;techniques&#x2F;inverse-conway-maneuver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thoughtworks.com&#x2F;radar&#x2F;techniques&#x2F;inverse-conway...</a>
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User23超过 4 年前
More on Conway’s Law at [1]. The adage bears out and while this article could be better, understanding the mirroring phenomenon really is important. And while it’s not a formal proof, I do find the argument that the law must hold to be true.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;melconway.com&#x2F;Home&#x2F;Conways_Law.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;melconway.com&#x2F;Home&#x2F;Conways_Law.html</a>
convolvatron超过 4 年前
i worked at an organization recently that has wholeheartedly embraced this approach to Conway&#x27;s law.<p>unfortunately, the groupings were decided based on a facile and outdated model of the product and were wildly unsuited for the reality of the day. kind of pessimal.<p>i think a more organic approach is necessary. even in larger organizations. i&#x27;ve never seen matrix (too many stakeholders, too many meetings, unclear unresponsibilities) do well...but surely there are other choices other than functional v product.
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