EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 46Topology Evolution

Most companies already have some sort of existing topology, but it had to start somewhere.

With startups, it usually happens when the number of engineers grows beyond 15 or so.

This is when the company realizes that the empowerment the employees had in the early days is now starting to suffer under the burden of coordination. They're also finding it more and more difficult to make decisions and to get simple things done. So, they decide to form two to three cross‐functional product teams in order to divide and conquer. Their decisions on how to do this establish the topology.

With larger companies that didn't grow up in the product team model, the starting point is usually when they moved to Agile, where they were instructed to organize around small, durable teams. How the company decides to divide up the teams establishes the topology.

Some topologies are established in response to a major change of product vision and/or the product architecture. For whatever reason, if the company makes a drastic change to strategic context of their product, then the topology may need to be revisited.

Regardless of the reason for reviewing your topology, you should optimize for the empowerment of the teams by focusing on the dimensions of ownership, autonomy, and alignment.

Evolving a Topology

No matter how empowering your initial topology is, it will not stay that way by itself. The realities on the ground are always changing, sometimes in ways that require ...