Creating Stream Teams
Creating stream teams involves the formation of cross-functional teams dedicated to specific value streams within a product.
Purpose
The purpose of creating stream teams is to align product resources and efforts towards delivering maximum value to customers and ensure that teams are directly contributing to strategic objectives.
- Enhanced Focus: Stream teams are focused on specific value streams, leading to deeper expertise and better outcomes.
- Faster Time to Market: Allows for quicker decision-making and adaptation to changes, fostering innovation and responsiveness.
- Enhanced Ownership: Empowers teams to own their value stream and make decisions that optimise delivery.
Context
Industry Context
Customer expectations are rising faster than ever before. Companies need to deliver value quickly and continuously to stay competitive. Creating stream teams allows organisations to split up a large product into more manageable parts, enabling teams to respond to market demands effectively and deliver high-quality products efficiently.
ZeroBlockers Context
Stream Teams are the core of ZeroBlockers' product development strategy. By creating autonomous, empowered cross-functional teams dedicated to specific value streams, we ensure that teams are aligned with customer needs as well as the product's strategic objectives.
Methods
| Method | Description | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Value Stream Funding | Identifying and allocating budgets to specific streams of work that deliver value to customers. | Ensures that resources are allocated based on strategic priorities, enhances focus and alignment. |
| Team Composition and Allocation | Selecting and allocating personnel to stream teams based on skills, experience, and strategic needs. | Builds effective teams with the necessary skills and expertise, enhances collaboration. |
Other Methods
| Method | Description | ZeroBlockers Opinion |
|---|---|---|
| Splitting by Feature | Organising teams around specific features or components of the product to ensure end-to-end ownership and accountability. | The goal is to create teams that can deliver complete features independently, reducing dependencies and bottlenecks. Splitting by feature means that teams will still be working on the same codebase and will incur the merging challenges, and lack of ownership, that come with that. |
| Splitting by Technical Layer | Allocating teams based on technical layers or components to ensure a clear separation of concerns and promote modularity. | Customers don't think in technical layers. They think in terms of features and value. Splitting by technical layer means that teams will need to coordinate in order to deliver value to customers. |
| Splitting by Customer Segment | Creating teams focused on specific customer segments or personas to tailor solutions to different user needs. | Aligning with customer segments is great for helping teams understand the needs of their customers. However, there is often too much to be built for a single customer segment to be owned by a single team. And it can lead to a lot of duplicated effort across teams. |
| Splitting by Business Process | Organising teams around distinct business processes or workflows to optimise efficiency and effectiveness. | Again, customers don't think in terms of business processes. They think in terms of the problems they need to solve. Splitting by business process can lead to a lot of duplicated effort across teams and a lack of ownership. |
Anti-patterns
- Misaligned Metrics: Defining success metrics that do not align with strategic objectives or customer value.
- Inflexible Structures: Failing to adapt team structures or reallocating resources as priorities and needs evolve.
- Overburdening Teams: Allocating too many responsibilities or streams to a single team, leading to burnout and decreased productivity.
- Underfunding Streams: Insufficiently funding critical value streams, hindering their ability to deliver desired outcomes.
Case Studies
Autonomous Teams
How Spotify solved the problem of 'lean-back' listeners even when management were uncertain.
Spotify
Streamlining Value with Cross-Functional Teams at FTD
How FTD transformed their organizational structure and processes by adopting value stream aligned, fully cross-functional teams.
FTD
Two Pizza Teams
Amazon faced a problem of slowing development speed. They decided to create autonomous teams who would be able to move faster. But it wasn't all plain sailing.
Amazon
Empowered Teams
How Skyscanner improved product performance by empowering teams, emphasising trust, autonomy, and customer-centric goals.
Skyscanner
