Teams & Structure
How you cut the org so work can flow through it.
Org design is systems design with people in the boxes. The lines you draw decide which work is cheap and which work is politically expensive.
Team size, structure, and cognitive load
Team size is a function of how much system a group of humans can hold in their heads, not of how much work there is to do.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Conway's law as a design tool
You will ship your org chart whether you meant to or not. So draw the architecture you want, then draw the org that produces it.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Platform teams: when, why, and when not
A platform team formed too early builds abstractions for problems nobody has. Formed too late, it inherits five incompatible ones.
50-150 · 150+
Embedded vs centralised: design, data, QA, security
Embed the specialists in the teams, centralise the standard. Neither pure model survives contact: embedded alone drifts, centralised alone becomes a queue.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Ownership is the atomic unit
Almost every system, service, and surface needs exactly one owning team. Shared ownership is usually unowned, and unowned things decay in a predictable order.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
On-call that doesn't burn people
The people who built it carry it, always. On-call load is a design signal, and a rotation that hurts is the system telling you something the roadmap isn't.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Design is not a paint layer
Design applied after the technical decisions are made can only make bad decisions look better. Its leverage is upstream, in the framing of the problem, not downstream in the polish pass.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
The real cost of a reorg
A reorg costs roughly a quarter of throughput and buys you a different set of problems. Do it only when you can say plainly that the current structure is the constraint.
50-150 · 150+
The platform team you already have
A platform team justified by a recurring pain has one real test once it's running: has that pain actually stopped. Adoption and satisfaction scores are a distraction from the only question that matters.
50-150 · 150+