Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. > > - Melvin E. Conway It doesn't matter if you work in a startup, scale-up, or a larger organization, in any case, the success of a product team typically equals growing such a team. First, you need to hire more people, then split the team, now there’s a group of teams to organize, and after a while, the loop eventually begins again. These changes bring challenges and opportunities to organizations. Here are some strategies for organizing product teams, what they optimize, and in which situation to use them. What to solve for? When organizing product teams it is important to consider the following four factors: completeness, independence, clarity, and balance. Spoiler alert: I haven’t found any way to optimize all of them. However, there are some clear patterns in which of these factors matter the most, depending on the stage your organization and those teams will be in. Completeness Making sure that teams and groups own a domain end-to-end. In a complete domain, teams/groups should be able to build a clear value-based vision and roadmap. Domains need to be tight enough (no holes) and wide enough to bring complete value over time instead of delivering features. Independence Moving fast is one of the most essential aspects of a team’s success. Making sure that each team is independent over its domain will highly contribute to its ability to move fast and create value overall. Independence is achieved when a team can promote its mission and achieve its goals with the development team they are working with, and with minimum dependencies on other teams. Product dependencies are not limited to development teams and technical dependencies.

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