EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 41Optimizing for Empowerment

Early in this book, we introduced the concept of team topology to refer to the way we organize our people into teams to best enable them to do great work.

Because team topology defines the boundaries between teams and establishes the scope of problems each team will consider, it's one of the most important decisions faced by product leaders.

Still, many companies don't give this decision the thought it needs.

Too often, team topology happens organically by following the path of least resistance. It may mirror an existing organizational chart or engineering skill set grouping, or it may track with the operational responsibilities of some business owner or stakeholder.

While these factors may sometimes be a good way to set boundaries between particular teams, that decision should be made intentionally after considering a wide range of factors. No topology decision should be made just because it's easy.

In many cases, the team topology was set years earlier, and people are reluctant to change the structure. What started off as a rational grouping is now creating unnecessary dependencies or complications that work against team empowerment. Here, leaders may need to make hard decisions to restructure all or part of their topology.

The bottom line is that, if you are a product leader, the empowerment of your company's product teams is greatly impacted by your topology choices.

Optimizing for empowerment requires balancing three interrelated goals: ...