Creating Great Teams

The Need for Speed

Some companies, especially those organizations founded during the Internet age, are born agile. They start out with small, cross-functional teams and scale by adding more teams as they grow.

But what about the rest of us? How do companies that are organized in a more traditional way move toward a small-team structure without descending into chaos or wasting valuable time? We have observed many organizations facing this challenge when they needed to accommodate rapid growth, started an agile adoption, or simply wanted to reorganize their existing teams because they felt they were in a rut.

When we first started moving toward stable teams at Trade Me, it was on quite a small scale, introducing one team at a time in a controlled ...