In my view the 2 things holding us back from being able to divide and conquer.

• It’s difficult for us to isolate two or more unique customers / stakeholders with diverging requirements. It seems we have one unsplittable objective / product vision. “build a massive configurable portal for multiple tenants”.
• We don’t have a methodology (e.g. consumer driven contract development) to facilitate rapid cross team feedback / communication.

I’m starting to realise that splitting the team is less about context boundary concerns / engineering challenges and more about problem statement / consumer refinement.

Random thought. If we are unable to find more than one meaningful customer then perhaps it might be worth shrinking back to a two pizza team?

What’s your view?

Do you feel your current team size is a problem?

The Secret to Building Teams at a Tech Startup

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-mccormick/the-secret-to-building-te_b_5287642.html

• About five years ago, we learned the value of small teams the hard way — by not having small teams.
• Each team needs a unique, clear and present customer.
• Each team needs a unique, clear and present goal.
• Each team needs to have autonomy to make strategic decisions.
• Backlog separation.

The Science Behind Why Jeff Bezos’s Two-Pizza Team Rule Works

http://blog.idonethis.com/two-pizza-team/

• An Amazon hallmark.
• Communication Gets Terrible as Team Size Grows. n(n-1)/2.
• Adding more and more people, when you’re not careful, erodes the protective buffer of work relationships against stress and frustration.
• The cheers rule. It’s harder to be in an environment where you’re not sure if everybody knows your name and understands who you are as a person.
• At most 6 or 7 people, including products, design and engineering.

Project team scaling

https://www.aoe.com/en/blog/project-team-scaling-how-we-scaled-a-scrum-team-beyond-two-pizzas.html

• Actually we did both – we split things up vertically AND horizontally. We just did it without splitting up the team. User Story Godparents. Basically a story anchor to following the idea of the story from inception to delivery.
• Architects. With separation comes the need for centralised decision making. Architecture. Architects.

When a number of small teams need to work closely together…

• More time needs to be spent on planning sessions.
• Showcase and sharing across teams.

Scaling Beyond Bezos’ “2-pizza team” Rule

https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/to-scale-past-bezoss-2-pizza-team-rule-try-switching-teams-every-few-months/

• The challenge with the 2-Pizza Rule is teams end up splitting awkwardly. There aren’t many magical solutions to this problem.
• Where to draw the line of separation between the groups? Horizontally? Vertically?
• The Solution: Switch the Teams Every X Months!

Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern

https://martinfowler.com/articles/consumerDrivenContracts.html

This article discusses some of the challenges in evolving a community of service providers and consumers. It describes some of the coupling issues that arise when service providers change parts of their contract, particularly document schemas, and identifies two well-understood strategies.