Scaling

A lot of friction can occur when empowered teams interact with traditional organizational structures. The goal of the organization is to enable the Stream Teams to deliver value to customers as quickly as possible. This requires some changes to the organizational structure.

Internal Product Teams

Stream Teams cannot contain all of the different business and technical specialists across the entire organization as the team would be too large. This means they will need to periodically interact with internal departments across the organization such as Finance, legal, HR, and more.

In addition, Stream Teams need to focus on the business differentiators rather than the common infrastructure and support services. We can pull out these common services into separate teams that are responsible for providing these services to the Stream Teams.

This is where Internal Product Teams come in. These teams provide the commodity services that Stream Teams need to build their products.

The discipline that makes Internal Product Teams work is productizing their services so that Stream Teams can self-serve on the common cases and only escalate the genuinely novel ones. See Incentivizing Productization for how to make this happen, including external examples (AWS, Stripe Atlas, Deel) of work the industry once thought was too bespoke to productize.

Enabling Teams

One challenge with having functional experts distributed around the organization is that it can be hard to share knowledge and best practices. We can solve this problem by creating functionally aligned Enabling Teams responsible for the development of the skills and tools required to deliver the product.

Ecosystem Teams

Ecosystem teams sit above all of the Product Teams, Internal Product Teams and Enabling Teams. They are responsible for setting the vision and strategy for the entire business unit and ensuring that the different teams are aligned and working toward the same goals.

Program Management

The conventional answer to scaling is to add more program management: more coordinators, more status meetings, more roadmap reconciliation. ZeroBlockers is designed to avoid this. Stable Stream Teams own their own delivery, Product Teams handle prioritization, and Internal Product Teams handle cross-cutting services, so the everyday coordination work disappears.

What remains is a small Program Management team for genuinely cross-cutting initiatives, such as regulatory deadlines, platform migrations, and acquisitions, that orchestrates work across teams without owning it. See Criteria for Running Projects for the detail.