Balancing Individual Software Team Flow with Cross-team Collaboration

Getting the balance right between often opposite and interconnected forces of decoupling and collaboration, when it comes to deciding on software development team boundaries for happy and effective teams, is as much and art as it is a science. Over the last 4 years we have been constantly evolving our team boundaries to try to find the best balance between increasing individual team flow whilst maintaining effective cross team collaboration.

We have run these experiments across a growing diverse and distributed team. We have been building a range of products which have a fair degree of explicit and implicit coupling between their subsystems. This talk covers the place we started from with some of the seminal work in this area, what has worked for us as we have grown and what we got wrong by failing to fully consider the effects of our own unique and changing context. If you are finding that as you strive to reduce coupling and dependencies between your software development teams there can be a tendency to fall into the trap of more siloed thinking, then this is for you!

As the software we build get more complex, rarely can one team support everything that is needed for the whole product to function. This talk focuses on the interactions between teams that have end to end ownership of part of a product but need to collaborate to get stuff done. It covers what you are aiming for, a few of the traps you need to look out for as you try to get there and some of the things we have tried so far on our journey to finding the right balance:
* Team interaction Fundamentals – What giants shoulders are we standing on?
* Clear Ownership and responsibility – Balancing cognitive load with situation awareness
* Increased Flow and reduced coupling – Balancing reduced dependencies with collaboration
* Scaling Happier effective teams – Improving team health to meet our businesses needs
* Adapting to change – Balancing breadth of change with loss of ownership
* Your context is Unique – Getting the balance right

Video producer: https://www.agileonthebeach.co.uk/