Ashley-Christian Hardy
Squads, Chapters, Tribes and Guilds
Team structure and organizational infrastructure scaling
Hi, I’m Ashley-Christian Hardy
In Progress…
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Why Reorganize?Companies want to make a product that is flexible, scalable and build in a way that means they can meet market demand quickly.
“Don’t just fix the product, fix the process too”
If you cannot scale, you are doomed for failure.
In start ups roles and responsibilities are often blurred, but in a larger organization this model is not sustainable.
Constraints
Feature Teams
Feature TeamsMany companies utilize this; Spotify being the most famous at the moment and are currently the poster-boy for Agile.
Spotify also renames their development teams ‘Squads’ which is a cool idea to get over the stigma that a Development Team should only contain developers.
Other companies that have adopted this naming convention, and some that have even come up with their own such as:
• Crew• Party• Unit• Faction• Troop• Line up
Scaling at Spotify
Squads & Tribes
• Small cross functional teams• End to end responsibility for
delivery• Self-organizing• Autonomous• Sit together• Have long term mission• Experts in their area• Like mini start ups
• A group of squads with similar business interest
• Squads within a tribe all sit together• Usually 100 or less• Shared lounges to create inter-squad
interaction• Regular informal team events.• Tribe leader provides the right
environment
Chapters & Guilds
• Promotes team collaboration and innovation
• Group of team members working in a special area; for example testing.
• Get together and exchange ideas.• Cross pollination• Chapter Lead acts as the line
manager
• Community of members with shared interest
• A group who want to share knowledge, code and practices
• Each guild has a co-ordinator• Guilds can be created anytime if
enough interest
How can you Implement in your Team? Squads
• Renaming your team can remove the stigma of Development teams only containing developers
• Teams should be fully autonomous and self-organising
• Loosely coupled with little or no dependencies
• Ideally 5-7 in size
How can you Implement in your Team? Chapter
• Most companies already have a variation of this with QA and Development teams
• Flat hierarchy structure
• Croups people with similar skills together, even if they are in different teams
• Helps with knowledge sharing
• Chapters report to a ‘Lead’ rather than management.
How can you Implement in your Team? Guild
• Can be more difficult to implement
• Require motivation, interest and co-ordination
• Start with something small as a ‘pilot’, possibly technical
• Assign a strong leader
• Add a fun element with logos or conferences:
How can you Implement in your Team? Tribe
• Required for scaling when your company / architecture grows
• Group similar business functions together such as mobile
• Ensure when splitting you do not create dependencies
• Keep autonomous teams
In SummaryThere are many ways you can reorganize and restructure your teams, but remember – renaming and changing where people sit will not solve all your problems.
Your architecture and organization should dictate how you want to work, not the other way around. Remember, the goal is to be able to deliver quickly, high quality products and be able to scale. Model on how you want your teams to behave and the culture you want to promote.Some questions you should ask yourself are:
• Can your teams scale with growth? Think about different scenarios; what id your company needs to produce a new type of product? What if your company goes into a new market? What if your company buys another company?
• Can you make sure each one of your features or departments gets the attention and development capacity they deserve?
• Can you keep bureaucracy at a minimum (see Spotify for MVB – it’s a great concept)? This is important for scaling so designing, releasing and developing doesn’t become painful and political.
• Can you ensure fast planning and a clean release process?
Thank you!
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