Enabling TTM With Contributor Model Teams

Enabling TTM With Contributor Model Teams

We often speak about the benefits of aligning agile teams with the system’s architecture. As Conway’s Law describes, product/solution architectures and organizations cannot be developed in isolation. (See https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/conways-law) Agile autonomous teams are able to act more efficiently, with faster time to market (TTM). Ideally, each team should be able to behave like a startup with the skills and tools needed to iterate until they reach the desired outcome.

Many of our clients are under pressure to achieve both effective TTM and reduce the risk of redundant services that produce the same results. During due diligence, we will sometimes discover redundant services that individual teams develop within their own silo for a TTM benefit. Rather than competing with priorities and waiting for a shared service team to deliver code, the team will build their own flavor of a common service to get to market faster.

Instead, we recommend a shared service team own common services. In this type of team alignment, the team has a shared service or feature on which other autonomous teams depend. For example, many teams within a product may require email delivery as a feature. Asking each team to develop and operate its own email capability would be wasteful, resulting in engineers designing redundant functionality leading to cost inefficiencies and unneeded complexity. Rather than wasting time on duplicative services, we recommend that organizations create a team that would focus on email and be used by other teams.

Teams make requests in the form of stories for product enhancements that are deposited in the shared services team’s backlog. (email in this case) To mitigate the risk of having each of these requesting teams waiting for requests to be fulfilled by the shared services team, we suggest thinking of the shared services as an open source project or as some call it – the contributor model.

Open sourcing our solution (at least internally) doesn’t mean opening up the email code base to all engineers and letting them have at it. It does mean mechanisms should be established to help control the quality and design for the business. An open source project often has its own repo and typically only allows trusted engineers, called Committers, to commit. Committers have Contribution Standards defined by the project owning team. In our email example, the team should designate trusted and experienced engineers from other Agile teams that can code and commit to the email repo. Engineers on the email team can be focused on making sure new functionality aligns with architectural and design principles that have been established. Code reviews are conducting before its accepted. Allowing for outside contribution will help to mitigate the potential bottleneck such a team could create.

Now that the development of email has been spread out across contributors on different teams, who really owns it?

Remember, ownership by many is ownership by none. In our example, the email team ultimately owns the services and code base. As other developers commit new code to the repo, the email team should conduct code, design, and architectural reviews and ultimately deployments and operations. They should also confirm that the contributions align with the strategic direction of the email mission. Whatever mechanisms are put in place, teams that adopt a contributor model should be a gas pedal and not a brake for TTM.