Scaling with Ecosystem Teams
Scaling with Ecosystem Teams refers to the strategic division of large ecosystem teams, which may include Product Teams, Internal Product Teams, and Enabling Teams, into smaller, more focused units.
Purpose
The purpose is to maintain efficiency and effectiveness as the team grows by preventing overcomplexity, bureaucracy and misalignment that can occur in large teams.
- Increased agility: Smaller units can adapt and respond to market changes more quickly.
- Enhanced focus: Allows teams to focus on specific market needs or regional characteristics.
- Improved scalability: Facilitates growth without the typical drawbacks of large organisational structures.
Context
Industry Context
As an ecosystem grows the complexity of managing the ever increasing Product, Internal Product and Enabling Team sizes can become overwhelming. In addition, the scope of the challenges can become very difficult and the cognitive load may prevent the team from being able to effectively design a strategy that can be executed.
ZeroBlockers Context
As Products grow Product Teams can split into smaller hierarchies of products. This can increase the number of products that an Ecosystem Team needs to manage as well as increase the overhead on Internal and Enabling teams which also will need to scale. The good news is that the Ecosystem Team structure is designed to be fractal and can also create hierarchies similar to Product Teams.
Methods
| Method | Description | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Splitting Ecosystem Teams | Creating new Ecosystems Teams and distributing or split the Product, Internal Product and Enabling Teams among them. | Improves focus, agility, and collaboration |
Anti-patterns
- Overly Large Teams: Teams that are too large can lead to communication challenges, inefficiencies, and reduced productivity.
- Overlapping Areas of Responsibility: Lack of clear boundaries between teams can result in duplicated efforts, conflicts, and dependencies between teams.
