1.0 Four Different Types of Teams

Stream aligned teams: organised around value streams, delivering value to a customer. As Jeff Bezos says, this kind of team should have “line of sight to a customer”

These other teams make the stream aligned teams go faster

Enabling team: these help manage scarcity. Eg there aren’t a lot of security engineers, user researchers, super good infrastructure okes going around. Enabling teams then act as consultants to the other teams
Complicated subsystem team - think PhD math people working on a complex bit of the product
Platform Team - platform & platform 2.0 from ING bank pretty interesting

Team first thinking

The team is the means of delivery
design team for cognitive load. Team has a maximum size, of about 8 people. This will also naturally limit the size of the software that the team has to be responsible for, while still understanding their domain pretty well
Choosing boundaries for team ownership is a skill. Definitely not something that should be done by a manager with no technical awareness, as it impacts the architecture of your software - Conway’s law
On Conway’s Law: The way your teams are structured, dictates how your software architecture turns out.
- Reverse Conway to mitigate worst effects

2 teams working together
X-as-a-service: 1 provides, 1 consumes. works best when the provider really takes into consideration the developer experience.
Facilitating: 1 team helps another

What’s the thinnest platform that could work?
If your org decides “we use AWS”, your thinnest viable platform can be something as small as a wiki page saying “these are the 5 AWS services that we use for ABCD”

From the original blog post about Spotify Model “this article is only a snapshot of our current way of working - a journey in progress, not a journey completed. By the time you read this, things have already changed” - Kniberg & Ivarsson
no heuristics for Conway’s law
no patterns for team interactions
no triggers for change and evolution

Encourages flow of change, as each team has all the capabilities it needs to deliver value
establishes and clarifies team responsibilities. no ambiguity in who owns what
promotes good kind of collaboration between teams
plans and budgets for cross-team enablers - think guilds; bringing people together from all over the organisation