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“Slowification” inspired a great conversation at our table. We talked about boulders in performance caused by architecture and lack of observability.
Calendaring one time is sometimes the wrong question. If you have the trust, the stakeholders can be heard as 10 distinct 5 minute discussions at the water cooler and then take the decision in the team who is doing the work. 10 people spending 50 minutes in a meeting is 500 minutes. Distinct discussions take 100 minutes. This is what the business is doing with external stakeholders anyway, but somehow it is not believed to work internally.
Besides doing Conway manouvres, it makes sense to openly name the compromises of the kinds of problems not solved by this iteration of the structure. That also arms the teams to identify patterns that were considered undesirable when designing the structure and potentially the teams can adjust the structure when it starts showing symptoms of hitting those exact problems.
Thank goodness they went to business school to have such good insights over software engineering... This is an argument to have a wrapping layer bigger than two-pizza teams who have autonomy to internally organize into architecturally viable team structures while giving the management some boxes to move around in org charts to realign to meet business needs.
For example Zalando (according to my understanding) is structured into "teams" of 30-50 people who own a vicious problem such as product recommendation. Those have all capabilities necessary to be completely autonomous. However, they have some lower level structures but getting to keep the same vicious problem when changing seating order is not as scary as the typical reorg and that's why it sometimes happens on its own when need presents itself.
Sure. However the idea hasn't been implemented that successfully anywhere since drawing org charts is a managerial privilege and people in teams have not been given the tools to really self-organize beyond the team boundary.
This is the idea around value streams (or tribes or - to some degree - ARTs) - and as Team Topologies points out you need to design (organization plus architecture). As Comic Agilé nudges at - just having “managers” design the org structure (teams-of-teams-of-teams) and “architects” design the systems-of-systems-of-systems is going to lead to the suboptimal mismatches and dominance of coordination work vs value delivery work that we see almost everywhere today.
Since incentives eat everything always, what incentives are in place motivating management/architects to keep doing this?