Teams as the unit of org scale

CTO SummitOctober 23rd, 2013@chfry

“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.”

6Twitter Confidential

The problem of scale @ twitter

143,200

33,000

11,000

Two models of teams (one good / one bad)

Team1

Team2

Team3

New Work

ConsultingStable teams

The Project Based Work Structure is Complex and Ineffective

The Team Based Model is Simple, Empowering, and Optimized

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

What are the keys to scaling distributed systems?

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

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

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

Conclusion

‣ Focusing on teams will scale you from 10-1000 engineers

‣ Learning teams can be autonomous

‣ Think holistically about your engineering organization as a system