Team Topologies: Lessons learned

In late 2023 I faced my most difficult leadership challenge yet. My team was growing, meetings and focus turned into difficult obstacles, we needed a change. Early 2024 we threw ourselves into the world of grown-ups: a company with multiple teams collaborating towards a common goal. Back then I published my most-read article ever on how we interpreted Team Topologies in the context of Shapemaker. This is the continuation of our story.

Did it work?

Yes. Oh, yes it did. It didn’t take many days until we saw a significant increase in productivity and in my 1:1s I heard excited engineers tell me stories of increased ownership of work. Meetings turned into a positive experience again! It worked to such an extent that we had to institute extra meetings to keep up with everything, because suddenly change was so quick that it was difficult to keep up.

What might have gone better?

There were definitely a few new challenges to overcome as well. We knew from the start that separating people into groups would make them stop talking to people in other groups. This hit us much harder than I would have expected out of our sociable and collaborative engineers. Coordinating projects and priorities across teams was another one of those predicted challenges which turned out to be way harder than we expected.

All in all, we didn’t run into anything extraordinarily surprising. Probably the reason that we were feeling the above pains stronger than expected was linked to the complex subsystems we have to work with. We are forced to depend on each other, but also forced to separate people to make other aspects easier. It’s a hard trade-off to strike, that’s for sure.

We evolved with communities

To meet the challenge of cross-team communication and alignment we established a concept we call communities. Communities in Shapemaker is a competence-based forum for knowledge-sharing and discussions. We run them for a couple of technical areas, everyone is free to join them or leave them at any time.

We value the empowerment of development teams, so those are the ones held accountable for the quality of work. Communities are there to help the teams and they give recommendations based on wider context and longer-term thinking.

An end to our teams

After eight months of working in the three teams we created, the time was ripe for another change. One team resolved their main responsibility within this time, leaving them with nothing to do. One team felt overwhelmed with the large amount of small things they needed to do. One team only scratched the surface of the huge responsibility assigned to them.

It felt like I was describing a negative outcome when I wrote that, but I think these months have been our most successful so far! We’ve learnt a lot about our challenges, a lot about each other and in the meantime several important subsystems have matured excellently. Time to put these learnings into practice.

A new chapter begins

Shapemaker will from now on have two teams of developers. Each team will be larger, allowing the teams more opportunities to balance their efforts between prioritized initiatives. The new teams were recomposed from the same areas of responsibility that the previous teams had, maintaining the interfaces between the teams and preserving the system architecture. The increased maturity of the system allows the teams to take on more responsibilities without feeling overwhelmed and we create an opportunity for some engineers to work on something new. The need for close collaboration between the new teams has also reduced, thanks to our improved understanding of our own technology.

I leave you with the same message as last time: Let the future come, we are ready and stronger than ever!