Learn how to building customer-aligned, cross-functional teams from the guy who grew SoundCloud’s engineering team to over 100 people and in the process transformed how music is shared and discovered. Presented at the Hive engineering leadership summit at the Tumo Center in Yerevan Armenia. Learn more about hiring top tech talent: https://teamable.com

1. How to build teams
Alexander Grosse

2. ABOUT ME
•Retired software engineer
•VP Engineering issuu
•Former VP Engineering
SoundCloud

3. MOTIVATION
•Company is growing
•What happens to the teams?

5. TRADITIONAL APPROACHES
• Layered approach
• Scrum Teams

6. FULL STACK TEAM
•Everything from css to
linux kernel?

7. ENGINEERING VIEW
All engineering skills necessary to work on
the backlog

8. BUSINESS VIEW
All skills necessary to work on
the backlog

9. 95% RULE
A team (in one office) should be able
to deliver 95% of their backlog to
production without time-blocking
dependencies to other teams.

10. TEAM EXAMPLE
Front end
Back end
QA
Product
Design
Support

11. MICRO SERVICES
Logical consequence out
of these teams?

12. ACCEPT IMPERFECT SETUPS
If they serve a purpose
use Conway’s law to your
benefit

13. ACCEPT IMPERFECT SETUPS
Monolith
Search Payment

14. REAL WORLD EXAMPLE
Front end
Back end
Infrastructure
Design
Front end
Back end
Front end Front end
Back end

15. WHAT ABOUT PURPOSE?
Try to align teams with customers

16. WHAT ABOUT MASTERY?
Better under commit and
over achieve
What about boring tasks?

17. WHAT ABOUT AUTONOMY?
Give goals, but don’t
prescribe how they should
be achieved
And give team the setup
to actually do that

18. SUMMARY
Build teams around
customers
Make them autonomous
Give them ambitious, but
achievable goals

19. PRODUCT OWNER
Role of the product owner
PO = superman?
alternative approaches
linemanagement