Enabling Microservice Success

Part II. Organizational Structure and Culture

To be successful with microservices, you need to do more than adopt the architectural patterns. There are organizational and cultural considerations and these are the first things to focus on because if you can’t get these right, you will be taking on a lot of additional complexity for not much benefit.

Because doing microservices successfully means changes to the organization and culture, you will find it very challenging if you don’t have support from the highest levels of your technology leadership. That starts with the way the organization is structured: Conway’s Law says that if the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization will win.

You need to find the right boundaries within your estate, ones that minimize dependencies between teams. Teams should be able to make progress without having to wait for another team to do something.

That means building an organizational culture to support that: with cross-functional teams that are empowered to work autonomously and a focus on a fast flow of business value.

Reducing cognitive load within teams is key to that. You can support your product-development teams through paving the road: providing a straightforward, self-service path to production.