Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 9. Organizing Your Teams

The way you structure your product teams and organize them around the work that needs to be done on features and products is incredibly important for the success of your product development. Companies tend to organize in three main ways: value streams, features, and technical components.

When I came in, Marquetly was structured around technical components. “Our Agile coach suggested we put Scrum teams over every area of our product so we have coverage,” said the CTO. Although this makes sense in theory, in practice it helped to promote poor product management.

During a workshop for the product team on good product management skills, I was stressing the importance of solid foundations, when one of the product owners chimed in. “Most of this is really great. I’d like to work this way, but I can’t because I have to keep the backlogs full for our login API. If I don’t do that, my developers won’t have anything to do.”

“Is it a new API?” I asked. “Are there massive issues with it right now that you’re trying to fix?” Turns out there were no major problems with it. It had been working fine. “What’s your goal? When do you know that your API is done and that you can move on to something else?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said. “This is what I own. This API is what our team owns, and we’ll never get something different. This is our feature—​we just own this forever.”

They were actively working on a technical component that was already in a steady state, where ...