Let's Build a Product Development Organization!

Lets Build a Product
Development Organization!
Kevin Goldsmith, CTO
@kevingoldsmith

@kevingoldsmith #buildingorgs
Why are we here?

• A strong development team
• A strong small product development organization
• A larger product development organization
Let’s talk about what it takes to build

Who am I?

• Long time leader/manager (20+ years)
• Microsoft
• Adobe
• Spotify
• Avvo
• Early-stage Startups
• Teams from 3 to 175 people

I’ve learned a lot of lessons.

The hard way.

Who are you?

• Your name
• Your current role
• The size of your current team
• What you hope to learn today
Please…

What are we doing today?

• The single team
• Building a strong team
• The small organization (2-4 teams)
• Build a strong organization
• The larger organization (4-8 teams)
• Building organizations for scale
Agenda

The most important thing you
will learn today

Be thoughtful. Be deliberate.

Learn. Adapt.

Be agile. To a point.

People are not software.

You cannot continuously deploy
organizational changes.

Building a strong team

Why does this team exist?

• Which Skills?
• What Roles?
• What levels of seniority for each skill?
To achieve your mission, what is needed?

• Budget?
• Time?
• Existing people?
What are your constraints?

• Un-agile
• Super effective for certain kinds of needs
• Deeply technical
• Very narrow missions
• Given constraints, may be the best approach
The team of specialists

• Very agile
• Very flexible
• Great for certain efforts
• Simple problems
• Exploration (speed of iteration > depth of iteration)
• Given mission may be the best approach
The generalist team

• Agile
• Somewhat flexible
• Great for autonomous teams
• Great for velocity
• Good for teams that have to support multiple platforms
• My preference for consumer product teams
The “T-shaped” team

What do you think?

• Product
• Developers
• Test
• UX
• Agile Coach
Team roles

True cross-functional teams

Diverse teams

• Diverse teams produce better results
• Diversity is along many axes
• Personality
• Experience level
• Human (ie: in your DNA)
Diversity

• Great ways to understand team
• DiSC
• SDI (Strength Development Inventory)
• Myers-Briggs
• Looking to build a set of balanced approaches to problem solving
• Create healthy tension
Personality Diversity

• Balance of experiences and approaches
• Create a mentoring culture
• Build the next set of technical leaders
Experience Diversity

Spider Maps are great tools for this.
Understanding current team strengths

Exercise

Create a spider map of the diversity of your current team.
Choose any axes that make sense for you. Have you learned
anything about the strengths and weaknesses of your
current team from this exercise? If you were going to hire
someone new, would this help inform for the kind of person
that you should look for?
Map your current team

The small organization

What is a team in your
organization?

• When is a new team created?
• What roles are required?
• What skills are needed?
• What is the process for selecting members of the team?
• What is the mission of the team?
• What is the lifetime of the team?
• What choices can the team make and which are prescribed?
Creating teams deliberately

• You need complete coverage
• Overlapping missions leads to turf battles between teams
• Distinct missions leads to things “falling between the chairs”
Team mission paradox

• How does a team wind down?
• What happens to the artifacts that the team created?
Ending a team

Team leadership

No Leaders = No Leadership

No Leaders = No Managers

It depends on the larger organization structure, and
company-defined roles as well as company culture.
How to decide on leadership structure?

• How are decisions made?
• How are responsibilities split?
• How to avoid decision-making bottlenecks?
• How are disputes resolved?
Leadership structure gotchas

What is the leadership structure
of your teams today?

Reporting structure vs team
structure

Aligned reporting / teams

• Plusses
• clear alignment
• clear accountability
• cross-functional leadership opportunities (potentially)

• Minuses
• lack of mobility/flexibility
• maximizing locally
• functional silos / blame game (potentially)

Matrix organization

• Plusses
• mobility / flexibility
• global maximization
• Minuses
• lack of clear accountability
• lack of alignment
Matrix organization

• Sociocracy / Holocracy
• Zappos
• Slack
• Self-organizing / democracy
• WL Gore
Other Organization models

• Self-organizing / no manager
• Valve
• Qumulo
• Github
Other Organization models

• Career development
• Mentoring
• Salary setting
• Handling personal issues
• Handling organization issues
• tie-braking
Jobs to be done in no-manager organizations

Discussion

Information flows

When your organization grows, communication is the
first casualty.

• Team meetings
• Town halls
• E-mail
• Wiki / Confluence / etc…
Formal communication

• Give context
• Inform
• Top-down
Formal communication

• Functional (formal or informal) organizations
• Guilds
• Clubs
• Mailing lists
• Slack-channels
• Point-to-point
• Lunch-roulette / fika
Informal communication

When to split?

• Team size / effectiveness
• Team dynamics
• New opportunity / priority
• Mission-growth
Split based on

• Organization growth patterns / budget
• How will this impact future decisions
• What is your primary reason?
• team effectiveness?
• velocity?
• throughput?
Considerations

• Deliberate
• hire in new team?
• seed new teams with senior folks and new people?
• leadership-led (need buy in from individuals)
Splitting techniques

• Self-organization
• need guiderails / constraints
• guarantee successful outcome

• Skill matching / match-game
• “I’m good at this”
• “I want to learn this”
• leadership tries to match up skills/desires to team needs

Be mindful of the humans!

What about the people who end
up with no chair?

Conway’s law

- Melvin Conway (paraphrased)
Any piece of software reflects the organizational
structure that produced it.

Structure your organization to reflect the desired software
architectural model.
Reverse Conway Maneuver

discussion

Spread the skills that are critical for organizational or
technical improvement.
Decentralize what you want to be good at

Centralize rare skills initially, and build capability (via hiring
or training). As you establish skills with a broader base,
decentralize responsibility to larger organization.
Centralize -> decentralize pattern

The larger organization

Larger organizations have the same issues as smaller
organizations.
Larger organizational issues

Larger organizations have the same issues as smaller
organizations… Just more so.
Larger organizational issues

• As the organization grows, watch for issues arising
• Solve them not just for today, but for continued growth
• Put an expected life-time on a process based on size
• Have a replacement ready beforehand
Be deliberate!

• Larger organizations require more process to operate, but the
process can quickly overwhelm and slow down the organization.
• Have just enough, but not too much.
• Maybe just slightly less than enough.
• Look for processes that are hurting and remove them.
• MINIMUM VIABLE BUREAUCRACY
Be deliberate!

Q&A / Open Topics / Lean
Coffee

Thank you!

Let's Build a Product Development Organization!

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