Is It Time To Reorg

Larger organizations tend to be split into smaller teams. Most agile teams are around five engineers in size. Often times the scope of their work is blurry, and they end up duplicating work.

When you find that teams are often producing competing solutions to a common problem, that is when you know it is time for a re-org. It should improve efficiency by having engineers be more specialized in one function area, and to focus on optimizing that feature.

Teams do not need to be aligned to one piece of technology. For example, you do not need to say team A writes all the CICD pipelines, team B only deals with the database, team C writes the API, and team D writes the UI. It is safe to have cross-functional teams, where the members have diverse specialties.

You want the organization to be structured so that you minimize the interfaces between services, and minimize the amount of necessary collaboration between them. Collaboration will always be necessary, but if less of it is needed then teams can be more productive.