Chapter 5 — Societies & Circles: not just another Product and Engineering matrix structure
Previous chapters: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Welcome to chapter 5 of our SpaceUP series. In previous chapters, we covered the differences between Spaceports and Societies, how Missions help us achieve our objectives, the purpose of the Ground Crew, as well as the key roles — Spaceport Leader, Mission Commander, Society Representative — and their responsibilities. Now, it’s time to focus on Societies and Circles, the pillars of cohesion among Spaceports.
Societies
This is where all the people with a common area of expertise connect. Currently, we have two main Societies: Product and Engineering. While Spaceports are more product-aligned verticals, Societies are more horizontal, crossing all Spaceports.
Daily life rituals and work among Spaceports can differ. To give you some examples: the newcomers’ onboarding may differ to some extent across Spaceports; Spaceports find their own way of doing retrospectives; Spaceports have office day(s) when they meet together or, conversely, hold no meeting days for an uninterrupted chunk of focused work, bug planning, and paying off technical debt. That’s the purpose. Giving each Spaceport enough autonomy to tackle problems on their own.
On the Society level, people live more like a community, with common denominator standards. A Society guarantees people are treated equally, regardless of which Spaceport they currently belong to.
Societies ensure people are having 1:1s, personal growth plans, proper training, etc. A Society defines the interview process and sets requirements for candidates to fulfill, regardless of their future Spaceport placement.
To give you an example: The Engineering Society sets and owns engineering processes and the modus operandi, e.g. DevSecOps, on-call duties, combined engineering practices, release and testing practices to comply with company objectives, such as the transition to cloud, etc. A Society defines the job ladder, ensures people are promoted regularly, and keeps their compensation package (salary & stock options) fair.
Reporting always follows an affinity to its Society. In other words, people and the managers they report to originate from the same Society, either Product or Engineering. While reporting within the Engineering society adheres to Spaceport affinity (your manager is from your Society and your Spaceport), reporting within the Product Society adheres to Circle affinity (your manager is your subject matter expert, e.g. a designer, UX researcher, etc.). This is up to the decision of a Society leader, either the Head of engineering or the Head of Product & Design.
You may ask: isn’t this a matrix organization structure? And the honest answer: yes and we have good reasons for it. We don’t want to end up with a silo organization with something like 7 engineering organizations. We intentionally designed a setup that allows us to connect people from multiple Spaceports so they can share their experience and knowledge, help others, and agree on some company-wide standards. People can safely jump on/off to a Spaceport without feeling they settled on a different planetary system.
Conflicts. Conflicts happen all the time, regardless of organization structure. Societies are autonomous in defining their own reporting structures, standards and processes while Spaceports are autonomous in defining their inner processes for tackling product challenges. In case of conflict between a Society and a Spaceport, all Society and Spaceport leaders report to the same boss — the Chief Product and Technical officer, who has the last say in unresolved disputes.
Circles
This is a group of people organized around a specific expertise or capability within the Societies. Societies are big, and there are still multiple internal groups, each focusing on a different area of expertise. These specialized groups are called Circles.
A Circle covers one of the key capabilities a Society decides to drive top-down across all Spaceports, for example product quality, cloud-native systems, or UX research. Usually, there is a representative from each Spaceport within a given Circle, unless states otherwise (e.g. a UX researcher doesn’t make sense in a Cloud & Infrastructure Spaceport). Spaceport representatives within a Circle are chosen based on a mutual agreement between a Circle leader and the Spaceport leadership.
Circles have power and autonomy to set their working habits, such as how often they meet, how exactly they tackle problems, and also their agenda. A Circle’s agenda is partially driven by the Spaceport’s needs, but also by objectives coming from the Society. These objectives are more high-level, like for example “Being a Kubernetes first-class citizen”, or “Shortening the release cycle”. The Society leader select Circle leaders. A Circle leader is an idea maker, an undoubted expert and a person who manages the Circle and has the final say. The Circle leaders set these objectives together based on the company objectives.
Circles have a strong impact on Society processes, such as hiring requirements, interview content, onboarding, training, or the feedback loop, but they also drive technology innovation and help tackle technology and architecture challenges ahead of us. To give you a couple of examples of what a Circle drives: Secure coding practices and Security training come from the Security Circle, and the Software Engineering Circle is focused on improving the developer experience, e.g. they pick a tool allowing engineers to better collaborate on technical debt.
Wrap-up
In this chapter, you’ve learned more about Societies and Circles and their role in the SpaceUP methodology. These organization horizontals hold people, processes and standards coherent across Spaceports — our product verticals. In the next chapter, you will learn more about the Mission lifecycle.
