Turning point

In previous story I talked about how our journey led us to our 2021 state. Obviously we were not happy with the state and had an idea, what the scope of the change should look like:

• Common approach to functionalities
• Unified ownership of both technical and product area
• Simplified processes

Common approach

From the get-go we were always aiming at a platform like approach. A way to deliver a single piece of software in different instances. But life happens, business priorities occur, deadlines come, and you do concessions. However the state so eloquently described by well-known proverb helped us and provided us with much needed turning point

Too many cooks spoil the broth

And with oh-so-many inputs its inevitable the functionalities start to deviate and it start becoming pretty obvious it’s hard to manage. By the time it became blocking us ever so often it was obvious we should switch our thinking/model to sort of internalized SaaS.

Takeaway? Scratch different team setups and unify under product teams.

Ownership

With so many different functionalities and new ones coming every day it’s hard to not slide into the technical debt, unmaintained/lazy code, prone to errors, lacking documentation, you name it.

Add into this mix an unclear ownership of both code and product direction and you get a recipe for a disaster.

So we take a platform and split it into “products” that are operated/owned by teams. What are our products teams then?

• Checkout
• Catalog
• Content
• Customer
• Platform

We do have supporting teams besides these five, but I won’t cover them in this topic.

And what is the team responsible for?

• Product ownership and it’s direction
• Codebase ownership and quality (of both code and product)

My approach to teams has always been to give the direction and support them along the way. Because I think (this comes from my favorite book managing Humans)

If you’re hiring someone you do that because you trust them to do their job.

And to me — unless that trust is broken? We’re able to figure out almost anything. If I trust you — why on Earth should I watch your every move and micromanage you? And that’s what I feel is sometimes getting lost in our work lives and it is an essence of the product teams.

Takeaway? Drive the change bottom-up, give the responsibility and ownership to the teams and support them in succeeding.

Process?

And with all those changes a need for way too many checks/steps/flows/processes disappeared just like that.

We still do have a process flow of course, but we’ll go into the detail next time. But before that we’ll look into a help-full toolset which helped us to frame our setup.