Lean from the Trenches

Chapter 2Structuring the Teams

One of the key challenges in software projects is how to organize people into decently sized teams and then how to coordinate between multiple teams.

As we scaled from thirty to sixty-plus people, we started running into serious communication and coordination difficulties—typical symptoms of growth pain. Fortunately, we were all located on the same floor; everybody in the project was within at most thirty seconds’ walking distance from each other. As a result, we could quite easily experiment with how to organize the project. In fact, collocation may well have been the most important success factor of this project.

We gradually evolved the team structure to something like this:

We have five teams: one requirements ...