Designing Autonomous Teams and Services

Designing Autonomous Teams and Services

by Nick Tune, Scott Millett
Released September 2017
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781491994313

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Book description

In high-performing organizations such as Salesforce and Spotify, autonomous product development teams own problems end-to-end—from interacting with customers to delivering engaging digital products. These teams find new ways to solve customer problems by constantly running experiments, using high-speed engineering capabilities to create extremely short customer feedback cycles.

In this report, you’ll explore how leading organizations increase autonomy across teams and services through techniques designed to accelerate product delivery and improve business/IT alignment. With examples and use cases, authors Nick Tune (Salesforce) and Scott Millett (Iglu.com) demonstrate how autonomous teams leverage continuous discovery and delivery to find the best solutions with the highest business value. This report is ideal for engineering executives, CTOs, software architects, and senior engineers.

  • Learn how to align business goals, team boundaries, and software architecture to solve customer problems
  • Create a culture of transparency by articulating strategic decisions throughout the organization
  • Analyze your organization’s problem domains to minimize organizational and technical dependencies
  • Learn techniques for modeling user journeys and business processes in your domains and subdomains
  • Design antifragile systems that respond to changing market conditions and new opportunities
  • Apply successful architectural patterns to avoid couplings in your software and couplings between teams

Table of contents

  1. 1. High-Performance Teams Continuously Deliver Business Value
    1. Low Autonomy Precludes Continuous Business Value
      1. Low Autonomy Derails Digital Transformation in the UK Government
    2. High-Performance Teams Are Autonomous
      1. Autonomy to Continuously Discover User Needs
      2. Autonomy to Continuously Deliver Business Value
      3. Continuous Delivery Alone Does Not Enable Business Agility
    3. Aligning Organizational and Technical Boundaries Enables Autonomy
      1. Aligning Boundaries Maximizes Continuous Discovery and Delivery
    4. In Summary: Enabling Teams to Be Autonomous
  2. 2. Communicating the Business Context
    1. Context, Context, Context: Understand Your Business Context
      1. Cascading Objectives
      2. Emphasize the Full Business Portfolio
      3. Explain Business Context Elements
      4. External Factors
    2. Mapping Your Business Context
      1. Creating a Business Model Canvas
      2. Creating a Product Strategy Canvas
      3. Creating Impact Maps
    3. Beyond Tools: Knowledge Dissemination Culture
  3. 3. Analyzing Domains
    1. Finding Domain Cohesion
      1. Subdomains
      2. User Journeys
      3. Business Processes
      4. Comparing Subdomains, User Journeys, and Business Processes
    2. Solution Space Building Blocks
      1. Bounded Contexts
      2. Autonomous Contexts
      3. Partnership Contexts
  4. 4. Discovering Contexts
    1. Explore Core Use Cases
      1. Outside-In Use Case Modeling
      2. Inside-Out Use Case Modeling
    2. Create Multiple Models
      1. Hypothesize with Context Maps
      2. Apply Domain Heuristics
  5. 5. Designing Antifragile Systems
    1. Coevolving Organizational and Technical Boundaries
      1. Maximizing Knowledge Sharing Between Teams
    2. Mapping the System
      1. Theory of Constraints
      2. Value Stream Maps
      3. Big Picture Event Storming
    3. System Validation and Optimization
      1. Historical Work Item Analysis
      2. Domain Evolution
      3. Lagging Validation
    4. Complexity Theory
  6. 6. Architecting Autonomous Applications
    1. Making Software Architecture Cross-Functional
    2. Microservices
      1. Microservices and Bounded Contexts
      2. Event-Driven Microservices
    3. Composing Applications
      1. Composite User Journeys
      2. Composite User Interfaces
      3. Backends for Frontends (BFFs)
    4. Brownfield Strategies

Product information

  • Title: Designing Autonomous Teams and Services
  • Author(s): Nick Tune, Scott Millett
  • Release date: September 2017
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781491994313