Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century – A Management Playbook for Tech Industry Leadership and Digital Transformation

by Jeff Lawson

A team starts small, say five people. As they grow and near the ten-person mark, we start to plan for how the team might soon be divided into two teams. The big question is typically how to divide the teams. How you do it is situationally dependent. Sometimes it’s by function of the product, sometimes it’s by layers of functionality, sometimes it’s by customer segment—but the most important thing is that you keep the customer, mission, metrics, and codebase together with that team. That last bit—the codebase—is the hard part because you have to plan ahead. Likely the system was built as one large codebase, and in order to split your teams, you must refactor the system into two codebases that two teams can independently own. This takes time; you usually plan these team splits at least six months ahead of time. But one upside is that you’re continually investing in your codebase, refactoring it into microservices, and fixing prior debt in the process. It’s like a regular spring clean, which is good hygiene when a team and product are growing quickly. This keeps your codebase constantly aligned with your teams, who are in turn aligned with your customer needs.