Re:Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams
by closeparen on Thursday July 30, 2020 @11:44AM
(#23999484)
>"communication is terrible"
My company has brought in a lot of Amazon people and ideas, but unfortunately we go this one backwards. "Communication is great." Managers are explicitly encouraged to structure projects to maximize cross-team and cross-org meeting hours.
Re:Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams
by pdelgallego on Friday July 31, 2020 @06:34PM
(#24015018)
It is quite common to get communication wrong, even inside Amazon. It leads to design by committee, slow decision making, and increase team dependencies.
I would love to hear your experience adopting Amazon mechanisms.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon. I help customers to adopt some of those mechanisms.
- Enable high-velocity decision making: Defining clear tenets that act as the north start for decision making at team level, and two-way doors thinking.
- Establish how you measure success, and how does relate to the goals of the organisation.
- Achieve team independency is a key factor, and having strong mechanisms such as the "away teams" concept, "communication is terrible" mental model and reducing cognitive overload by relying on platform teams
- Nominating a single-threaded owner for programs and business outcomes.
- Articulate how the organisation works across teams using mechanisms such as bar raisers, OP1/OP2, PR/FAQs, CoEs, WBRs, experiment-driven teams, ...