Presentation from full-stack agile on how you can scale your agile teams as your company grows. As your company grows your teams need to be able to adapt to change quickly.

1. Ashley-Christian Hardy
Squads, Chapters, Tribes and Guilds
Team structure and organizational infrastructure
scaling

2. Hi, I’m Ashley-Christian Hardy
In Progress…
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3. Why Reorganize?
Companies want to make a product that is
flexible, scalable and build in a way that
means they can meet market demand
quickly.
“Don’t just fix the product, fix the process
too”
If you cannot scale, you are doomed for
failure.
In start ups roles and responsibilities are
often blurred, but in a larger organization
this model is not sustainable.

4. Constraints
Feature Teams

5. Feature Teams
Many companies utilize this; Spotify being the most famous at
the moment and are currently the poster-boy for Agile.
Spotify also renames their development teams ‘Squads’ which is
a cool idea to get over the stigma that a Development Team
should only contain developers.
Other companies that have adopted this naming convention,
and some that have even come up with their own such as:
• Crew
• Party
• Unit
• Faction
• Troop
• Line up

6. Scaling at Spotify

7. Squads & Tribes
• Small cross functional teams
• End to end responsibility for delivery
• Self-organizing
• Autonomous
• Sit together
• Have long term mission
• Experts in their area
• Like mini start ups
• A group of squads with similar business
interest
• Squads within a tribe all sit together
• Usually 100 or less
• Shared lounges to create inter-squad
interaction
• Regular informal team events.
• Tribe leader provides the right environment

8. Chapters & Guilds
• Promotes team collaboration and
innovation
• Group of team members working in a
special area; for example testing.
• Get together and exchange ideas.
• Cross pollination
• Chapter Lead acts as the line manager
• Community of members with shared
interest
• A group who want to share knowledge,
code and practices
• Each guild has a co-ordinator
• Guilds can be created anytime if enough
interest

9. How can you Implement in your Team?
Squads
• Renaming your team can remove the stigma of Development
teams only containing developers
• Teams should be fully autonomous and self-organising
• Loosely coupled with little or no dependencies
• Ideally 5-7 in size

10. How can you Implement in your Team?
Chapter
• Most companies already have a variation of this with QA and
Development teams
• Flat hierarchy structure
• Croups people with similar skills together, even if they are in
different teams
• Helps with knowledge sharing
• Chapters report to a ‘Lead’ rather than management.

11. How can you Implement in your Team?
Guild
• Can be more difficult to implement
• Require motivation, interest and co-ordination
• Start with something small as a ‘pilot’, possibly technical
• Assign a strong leader
• Add a fun element with logos or conferences:

12. How can you Implement in your Team?
Tribe
• Required for scaling when your company / architecture grows
• Group similar business functions together such as mobile
• Ensure when splitting you do not create dependencies
• Keep autonomous teams

13. In Summary
There are many ways you can reorganize and restructure your teams, but remember – renaming and changing
where people sit will not solve all your problems.
Your architecture and organization should dictate how you want to work, not the other way around. Remember,
the goal is to be able to deliver quickly, high quality products and be able to scale. Model on how you want your
teams to behave and the culture you want to promote.
Some questions you should ask yourself are:
• Can your teams scale with growth? Think about different scenarios; what id your company needs to produce
a new type of product? What if your company goes into a new market? What if your company buys another
company?
• Can you make sure each one of your features or departments gets the attention and development capacity
they deserve?
• Can you keep bureaucracy at a minimum (see Spotify for MVB – it’s a great concept)? This is important for
scaling so designing, releasing and developing doesn’t become painful and political.
• Can you ensure fast planning and a clean release process?

14. Thank you!
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