Teams as the unit of organization scale
- 1. Teams as the unit of org scale CTO Summit October 23rd, 2013 @chfry
- 3. “By focusing on teams you can scale from 10 to 1000 people quickly and easily. Your organization will be more dynamic, decentralized and solve problems faster.”
- 6. The problem of scale @ twitter 143,200 33,000 11,000 Twitter Confidential 6
- 7. Two models of teams (one good / one bad) Consulting Stable teams New Work Tea m1 Tea m2 Tea m3
- 8. The Project Based Work Structure is Complex and Ineffective
- 9. The Team Based Model is Simple, Empowering, and Optimized
- 10. What is a team? Real teams have: “a team task, clear boundaries, clearly specified authority to manage their own work process, and membership stability over some reasonable period of time” - J. Richard Hackman Leading Teams
- 11. What are the keys to scaling distributed systems?
- 12. Treat your people at least as well as you do your hardware... ‣ Focus on throughput over utilization ‣ Parallel-izable and distributed modules ‣ Remove or scale bottlenecks ‣ Self healing / Self correcting ‣ Teams can learn and adapt
- 13. What’s an Engineering team @twitter? ‣ Teams are small < 10 people ‣ Teams sit together ‣ Engineering ICs are only on one team ‣ Teams are not virtual ‣ Goal is one engineering manager per team ‣ One DRI for the project ‣ Discoverable and public goals ‣ Team has everything and everyone it needs to deliver ‣ Minimize dependencies ‣ Teams exist for long lived efforts
- 14. Scaling Mobile @twitter Problem: we had two small teams that build mobile apps ‣ Defined what a team is ‣ Scaled the bottleneck ‣ Put mobile engineers on all teams ‣ Created a way to run experiments ‣ Train everyone in mobile engineering ‣ Got into a monthly rhythm
- 15. Conclusion ‣ Focusing on teams will scale you from 101000 engineers ‣ Learning teams can be autonomous ‣ Think holistically about your engineering organization as a system
Editor's Notes
- #3: Roman legion is the most scalable org in history and took over the world - 10 squads (contubernia - a tent group of generally 8 men) = a century, each commanded by a centurion = 80 men [note that the size of a century had diverged from its original, literal meaning of 100] 6 centuries = a cohort = 480 men 10 cohorts = a legion = 4800 men
- #5: How do I know this Its also informed by my growing up
- #6: I appreciate hard work and thinking deeply about systems. So twitter has challenge of scale in terms of transactions and teams
- #11: Example!
- #16: Make it personal