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Looks like I am number 3293. Here and ready to rock the Watch Party Tomorrow.
👋 Hello everyone. Posting this here because I don’t know a better avenue and I think you are best people to discuss this with. My company (~35 engineers) is doing a small re-org that splits the existing engineering team into product & foundation engineering. Currently there is no such split. Nothing is changing on the org chart besides managers. That’s structure. However I think this will change the dynamics. I work in the SRE team right now. Our work is highly collaborative across all the different teams (because SRE work is vertical and horizontal) and aligns with engineering objectives at the highest level. The SRE team is going to be a part of foundation engineering. My gut tells me this new structure is going to put a strange boundary between “product” and “foundation” engineers and push SRE concerns to the edge of the organization. My gut also tells me the org is too small for this structure given the existing software architecture is at odds with the org structure (software architecture does not promote autonomy or point to clear owners). I understand my org is not enterprise scale. I have the feeling that org structure is putting the cart before the horse and will create more WIP, blurred ownership, and now require coordination across two boundaries (across teams inside product/foundation then across product/foundation) for any meaningful work. Has anyone been through something similar and can offer advice for a growing org?
I agree with everything you said. Not sure if this will help you but I find this article does a good job explaining why org structures (and processes) need to come after business and architecture (BAPO model instead of OPAB): https://janbosch.com/blog/index.php/2017/11/25/structure-eats-strategy/ Of course, in my book Team Topologies we also talk about product and engineering as fundamentally intertwined, splitting them introduces artificial limitations and can severely inhibit the necessary team interactions to happen (SRE or others).
@me1208 thanks for the link. I’m familiar with Team Topologies and recommended it to my manager a while ago. It seems off to me that parts of the book are quoted as motivation for this re-org.
uh, that's surprising. Of course, the devil lies in the details but we would not encourage structures that keep teams that need to interact regularly apart from each other.
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