Chris Fry, angel investor and former SVP of Engineering at Twitter, gives an actionable talk on scaling engineering teams.

1. Teams as the unit of org scale
May 20th, 2015
@chfry

3. “By focusing on teams you can scale from 10 to 1000 people quickly
and easily. Your organization will be more dynamic, decentralized and
solve problems faster.”

5. Twitter Confidential 5
The problem of scale @ twitter

6. Two models of teams (one good / one bad)
Team
1
Team
2
Team
3
New Work
Consulting Stable teams

7. The Project Based Work Structure is Complex and Ineffective

8. The Team Based Model is Simple, Empowering, and Optimized

9. What is a team?
Real teams have:
“a team task, clear boundaries, clearly specified authority to manage
their own work process, and membership stability over some
reasonable period of time”
- J. Richard Hackman Leading Teams

10. What are the keys to scaling distributed systems?

11. Treat your people at least as well as you do your hardware...
‣ Focus on throughput over
utilization
‣ Parallel-izable and distributed
modules
‣ Remove or scale bottlenecks
‣ Self healing / Self correcting
‣ Teams can learn and adapt

12. What’s an Engineering team @twitter?
‣ Teams are small < 10 people
‣ Teams sit together
‣ Engineering ICs are only on one team
‣ Teams are not virtual
‣ Goal is one engineering manager per team
‣ One DRI for the project
‣ Discoverable and public goals
‣ Team has everything and everyone it needs to deliver
‣ Minimize dependencies
‣ Teams exist for long lived efforts

13. Scaling Mobile @twitter
Problem: we had two small teams that build mobile apps
‣ Defined what a team is
‣ Scaled the bottleneck
‣ Put mobile engineers on all teams
‣ Created a way to run experiments
‣ Train everyone in mobile engineering
‣ Got into a monthly rhythm

14. Conclusion
‣ Focusing on teams will scale you from
10-1000 engineers
‣ Learning teams can be autonomous
‣ Think holistically about your
engineering organization as a system

15. Thank you!
@chfry