Life at Onefootball: scary close to fully Autonomous teams

This talk was given last year at the Spaces Summit, an internal conference of bol.com. Sharing my first experiences on how we work at Onefootball, focused on Product & Engineering. Explaining how our teams are organized, giving insights in our ways of working, and giving my opinion why this is working so well.

Summary

Below you can find a short summary of the talk, a TL;DW, highlighting some of the important points.

Onefootball

We are a very international company, with around 200 people we are building the ultimate Football platform for fans. Bringing together all content so that you only need one (digital) product.

We have a lot of loyal and active users around the world. With more than 11 million Monthly Active Users (MAU's), with an average of 50 sessions per month. Illustrating the football fans and our product being part of their routine.

Team organization & Way of working

Within Product & Engineering, we are working with multidisciplinary Product teams. It depends on the product which disciplines are within the team, but in the end it will result in different types of engineering disciplines, design & product, working together in one team.

At the time we have different domains (News, Scores, Platform), with different product teams in each domain. Where each team has end-2-end responsibility for their product. Both of the discovery (determining the most valuable ideas) and the delivery (implementing it for the users).

Why this is so awesome

• Purpose: with this setup, you can really focus on the customer and make a direct impact on them.
• Autonomy: as a multidisciplinary team we are working with Business + IT (or Product & Engineering) together as one team and really have autonomy.

Why this is needed

• Customer focus: you need to balance innovation, optimization, and operation. This is only possible if you have full responsibility and autonomy as a team, making these decisions based on what is best for the customer.
• Continuous Innovation: true business agility comes from the ability to test ideas, adapt fast to different opportunities, which can only be done if you are also responsible for the discovery.

Our own challenges

• Startup > Scaleup: growing as a company comes with its own challenges, where not everybody can be involved everywhere anymore.
• Bottleneck can shift: where normally the bottleneck is on the development, now also the bottleneck can be the analysis and discovery capacity within the team.
• It's a mindset change: you really need to become outcome-driven. This way of working means that sometimes as an engineer you will write less code. If you don't focus on the outcome this can feel unproductive.

For more examples and illustrations, watch the talk! :)