teams Archives - rinf.tech https://www.rinf.tech/tag/teams/ Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:43:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.rinf.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/favicon-150x150.png teams Archives - rinf.tech https://www.rinf.tech/tag/teams/ 32 32 Software Teams vs. Squads: What’s the Best Approach for Your Next Project? https://www.rinf.tech/software-teams-vs-squads-whats-the-best-approach-for-your-next-project/ Thu, 22 Sep 2022 16:53:23 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=20407 The article looks into advantages and disadvantages of using Agile Teams versus Agile Squads in software development projects.

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Agile Teams vs. Squads: What's the Best Approach for Your Next Project?

Software development has become a complex process involving many moving parts. As technology projects grow larger and more complex, engineers need to work together across multiple disciplines and locations.

Distributed software development requires effective communication and collaboration tools to keep everyone informed and aligned. In this case, the good news is that there are plenty of ways to manage software projects effectively. When it comes to proven and well-established ones – nothing is more firmly rooted in software product development than the Agile methodology that "preaches" a Team as the key driver of project success.

In Agile, the key is to build a strong team culture. The way the software development team works together will determine project success. In fact, the Agile Manifesto talks about the importance of teamwork several times. It also reaffirms the value of highly motivated, self-organizing teams that continuously communicate and continuously strive to improve. 
 
On the other hand, a Spotify Squad model is gaining a lot of traction nowadays as a highly effective way of scaling Agile teams and as an alternative to organising and managing them.

So, what’s the best approach for your next software development project? Agile Teams or Squads? 

Before we dive into the key differences, let’s define them.

Contents

What is an Agile Software Team?

An Agile team is a cross-functional group of people that have everything they need to create a working, well-tested product.

Agile teams are usually co-located and are often fully dedicated to a project during its duration, with no commitment to other projects.

The team is typically cross-functional, and the roles will vary depending on project needs and the type of Agile framework chosen.

For example, when using Scrum, an Agile team should have a Scrum Master, Product Owner, and other required team members (e.g., front-end developers, back-end developers, UX/UI designers, testers and QA engineers, etc.). The Scrum Master (can be a team lead or project manager) oversees the project, facilitates collaboration, and organizes daily meetings. The product owner ensures that the final product meets customer requirements. Domain experts and other stakeholders can contribute to the project as needed, but they are not usually considered part of the Agile team.

Each team member contributes their unique skill set to the success of the project and is held accountable for their work. 

What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Agile Teams?

Agile teams offer many advantages. They allow for:

  • greater collaboration between members,
  • better communication,
  • increased productivity, and
  • improved morale.

 

There are some disadvantages, but the primary drawback is scaling. Software teams may not always scale well, especially if the size of the team grows beyond 15-20 members. Whenever this happens, efficiently managing the software development project can quickly become challenging.

However, some teams have also run into issues when using Agile. These Agile flaws can derail a project and jeopardize its success, so it’s important to recognize and address them before they get worse.

Some of the disadvantages are:

  • Lack of documentation

 

Agile teams aggregate large amounts of data into small user stories that don’t contain a lot of detail. This can make it difficult for the developer to understand the exact customer requirements. Without a well-documented plan or formal process, team members can easily get confused as they go through project stages.

  • Scope creep

 

Customer needs are constantly changing, which inevitably leads to the project scope expansion. Deliverables increase rapidly, and new features are often added to the workload. Some requirements may need to be completely rewritten or replaced with updated ones. Teams can get overwhelmed and lose control of these requirements, not knowing which ones to prioritize.

agile team
How Agile Team Works

What are Agile Squads?

In contrast to software teams, software squads are smaller groups of people who are responsible for specific tasks. Created by the streaming giant Spotify, squads are similar to cross-functional teams but operate independently.

Squad members are assigned tasks and report directly to the squad leader. The squad leader plays the role of an Agile coach or anchor developer for the squad. These squads usually have three or four development pairs engaging in “pair programming.”

what is squad in software development
How Squads Are Organized

What is the Spotify Model?

Spotify is a popular music streaming platform that allows users to listen to millions of songs online. To build their business, Spotify created a new organizational structure called the Spotify model.

This new organizational structure was designed to solve the problem of having hundreds of employees working on a single project. First introduced in a white paper a decade ago, the Spotify Model was the first to introduce squads into the software development environment.

The Spotify model uses four fundamental principles:

  1. Autonomy
  2. Focus
  3. Accountability
  4. Transparency

 

Autonomy

In autonomous software development teams, each individual has complete freedom to choose their own path. They can use whatever software development methodology or framework they are most comfortable using to get the job done.

Focus

In the Spotify model, focus ensures that all members are accountable for a common purpose. For example, complete the overall software development project.

Accountability

From a macro “focus,” we can narrow it down to personal accountability. Each member of the squad will know precisely what they should do.

Transparency

Transparency ensures that everything is shared among all members.

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What Are the Advantages of Using Agile Squads?

Like Agile teams, squads have many advantages. However, the main advantage is that they can quickly respond to changing requirements. 

Other advantages include:

Faster product development and predictable project velocity

Time is one of the most common risks in product development. As products evolve and new challenges arise, teams that are not flexible and adaptable struggle to meet deadlines. Since squads plan together according to their capabilities, share knowledge and communicate frequently, they can remain flexible and adaptable. Thanks to this, they can minimize downtime, quickly overcome difficulties and offer a predictable speed of project implementation.

Squads enable waste reduction and downtime minimization. Each squad member participates in sprint planning, so each person is assigned specific tasks that collectively match the squad’s capabilities. Because squads typically use rolling-wave planning, they can quickly adapt and change to meet changing project requirements. This allows us to avoid typical downtime issues such as waiting, underutilized staff, and over-processing.

Co-location

Co-location offers several benefits that are often underestimated. It helps 

  • optimize development time, as teams can discuss problems face-to-face and find solutions faster; 
  • reduce unnecessary traffic and travel time; 
  • facilitate knowledge transfer.

 

Besides this, squads that share the same workspace can learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and get to know each other better, which helps them develop trust and become more effective as a collective.

Autonomy and alignment

At rinf.tech, each of our squads works towards common goals in the product development process— for example, implementing a certain feature by a certain due date.

Squads are autonomous in  deciding how they are going to achieve their goals within the overall product strategy. While the product owner creates user stories according to the product’s goals, squads determine the best way to accomplish them. We’ve found that this practice makes our squads more efficient and creative, which ultimately leads to better products.

We’ve found that this practice makes our squads more efficient and creative, which ultimately leads to better products.

Risk mitigation

Project teams typically face two major challenges in product development: knowledge and personnel risks.

The former is the result of poor communication and collaboration, leading to a knowledge gap where each person has the knowledge to do their part but does not know what the other members are responsible for. The latter is the risk associated with project team members. For example, if someone is fired or has an emergency and needs time off, there’s no one to replace them.

Squad-based development helps reduce and mitigate these risks by encouraging cross-functional teams able to have a 360-degree view of the project. The easy knowledge transfer within squads allows them to adapt quickly if a staffing problem arises without starting from scratch.

Wrapping up, Agile Squads provide the following benefits:

  • Allow flexibility and collaboration.
  • Eliminate bottlenecks and ensure you solve the most pressing problems first.
  • Develop in-depth functional knowledge.
  • Encourage efficiency and responsibility.
  • Enable faster integration of user and market feedback.
  • Create unparalleled experiences for team members.

What Are the Disadvantages of Using Squads?

Like anything in life, software squads also come with some disadvantages. The main one is that they are challenging to manage since they lack a central point of control. 

Other disadvantages include:

  • Additional frameworks are needed for effective management, such as OKR or KPIs, as well as Scrum or Kanban,

  • As Squads require a completely different approach to work, recruitment and management practices should reflect the required approach.

How to organise Agile squads
Ways to organize Product Squads

Is Agile Squad the Right Approach for Your Next Software Development Project?

If you want to scale the Agile approach at your organization, a Squad could be ideal because of its simplicity. It helps software developers manage a massive project by breaking down tasks into smaller, manageable chunks. For example, a Java squad can just focus on Java-based functions.

If you already have disciplined and organized developers onboard, it will work well because it’s an informal approach that enables innovation and self-management. It also perfectly aligns with agile principal benefits like greater adaptability, improved quality, and customer satisfaction.

Agile squads are highly recommended for projects where innovation is prioritized over predictability. 

Before implementing a Squad model, project managers and product owners must keep in mind that it’s essentially a generic software development model. They can adapt it as needed to suit their specific business needs better.

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]]> How to Scale a Software Development Team: Tips and Best Practices​ https://www.rinf.tech/how-to-scale-a-software-development-team/ Thu, 05 May 2022 11:43:56 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=18217 This article shares tips and the best practices of software team scaling from business and technical perspectives.

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How to Scale a Software Development Team: Tips and Best Practices

Software teams are typically scaled to increase in-house or outsourced product development capacity, add new and missing skills, support aggressive business growth, etc.

Hiring more people or creating one or two additional subteams can help product owners cope with new challenges faster and more efficiently. However, along the way, many things can go wrong. Why? This often happens due to the lack of streamlined internal processes, poor corporate culture, wrong hires, lack of an achievable product roadmap, and a lot of other reasons. Scaling isn't just about hiring more professionals; it's more about the ability to establish proper communication within the team, set the right priorities and metrics, launch motivational and retention initiatives, and more.

At rinf.tech, we have firsthand experience with building highly efficient client-tailored dedicated development teams and managed teams in Eastern Europe. This makes us well-placed to share some Team Scaling tips and tricks drawn from many lessons learned. That’s what this article is going to address.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s define when it’s high time to consider software team scaling.

Contents

When does it make sense to scale your software development team?

Tech team scaling is directly related to how your business is doing. In order to decide if you need to scale, you must understand the current state of your company.

Team scaling at software service companies

The service company provides custom software development services to other businesses. The size of your team completely determines the number of developers that you can provide to the client, and your income, accordingly. If you don’t have enough in-house resources, you have several options to scale your custom-tailored team. To name just a few:

  • Team augmentation

That’s the practice of hiring additional staff remotely from offshore/nearshore talent pools and integrating them into the in-house team or using them as a standalone software development division.

  • Tech talent rental

You can literally rent the missing skills from your partners who have better access to talent or keep developers on the bench waiting for new projects to come. You can rent specialists on a full-time or part-time basis, depending on your client’s needs.

Team scaling at product companies

A product company focuses on developing a product and launching it to the market. As such, your software team size and its technical expertise determine your product development speed and its unique value proposition compared to the competition.

These companies may need to scale when the team misses another project’s release date or when product development is progressing as expected, and more engineering talent is needed to keep up with the schedule. 

Scaling is an option worth considering if you’re experiencing one of the above cases.

Challenges resulting from incorrect scaling

Suppose you need additional software developers. Intuitively hiring new team members may seem like the best solution. It is indeed, but there is something to think about. This step should be carefully planned in advance and in line with the company’s business strategy. Otherwise, the onboarding of new employees can lead to the following problems:

  • Unbalanced workload 

Team growth leads to problems with division of responsibility, team management, and excessive communication.

  • Minor improvements and bug fixes are time-consuming

As the number of projects grows, project support time increases.

  • Application architecture and code aren’t adapted for a scalable team

In the end, reckless scaling leads to a drop in efficiency, an increase in costs, and, as a result, business shake-ups.

Let’s take a closer look at why these issues occur and how to avoid them when planning your product scaling project. 

How to prepare for Team Scaling from a business perspective

  • Specify the essentials

Start by focusing on the core elements of your particular business. Without a clear understanding of your business mission, target audience, and where you are going, building a successful product is next to impossible. Even if you do not have any issues now, this does not mean that they will not appear down the road.

  • Define your strategy and metrics

The completion of the mission and vision statements determines the company’s product development strategy. Scaling must match this strategy. Lack of understanding of “why” you are scaling from the strategic perspective will lead to wrong decisions and losses in the long run.

To track progress and stay on the same page as your teammates, define performance metrics and key performance indicators.

  • Assigning Product Owner Roles

As the number of projects grows, it’s a good idea to expand the responsibilities of the project manager to include the product owner so that this person becomes a kind of “mini-CEO.” These additional responsibilities include analyzing the market and finding ways to add value to the product for customers, leading to business growth.

  • Determine the minimum and maximum team size

Scaling brings about changes in the structure of your company. Keep in mind that smaller teams are much easier to manage.

Ideally, teams should be kept to 7-10 people. Jeff Bezos’ “Two Pizza Rule” is a perfect example of how it should work. It states that the team must be large enough to be fed two pizzas. If your team exceeds this number, you better split it up and create several subteams or employ the Spotify model and build feature-based squads.

  • Keep your Software Dev Team compact and independent

Small teams are the basis of flexible scaling. However, the number of teams should not grow just like that. It makes no sense to create a separate team if it is not an independent unit. This will only exacerbate communication and management problems.

Ideally, a structured team should be able to execute project increments while being completely independent or as little dependent as possible on other teams. Each team member must be fully committed to and accountable for the results of the project.

Small teams keep people focused and dedicated, providing a better idea of how they contribute to a common goal.

  • Optimize communication channels

The growth of the company and changes in the organizational structure require a revision of communication channels. This is especially true now that many employees work remotely.

If you’ve ever worked with remote employees, you know how easy it can be to lose information. Redesign communication channels so that each team member gets the information they need quickly with minimal digital noise.

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  • Automate your business processes

Any manual process is much more difficult to scale. With the growth of the development team, some tasks become too expensive and, at the same time, bring minimal effect.

Try to automate your business processes as much as possible. This will allow you to allocate your resources in the most efficient way.

Setting up CI/CD will help automate some steps and ensure the maximum quality of your service.

  • Synchronize your teams

Now let’s dive into how product development teams can be synchronized.

When scaling a product development team, coordination issues can arise. For example, one team has already completed its part of the project, and the second is still in the process. As a result, the whole development process is slowed down because all the parts are interconnected, and you can’t move further without finishing the second part.

To avoid this, scale the team by the scope of work it can do. Discuss plans with other team leaders and resources as needed.

  • Hire the right people

People are the backbone of any company. All of the above tips will not give the expected result without the right people.

Understanding the “right candidate” can be tricky. Therefore, it’s critical for any company to invest money and efforts into brand development and determination of the corporate values, mission, and vision. Once you put them in place, it’ll be easier to stack up your expectations against the above elements of your brand identity.

Don’t underestimate the importance of corporate culture. The scaling stage allows for serious culture testing.

Most people find it difficult to accept change. Sudden changes can severely disrupt your team morale and productivity. It is, therefore, important to consider the human factor when making scaling decisions.

  • Involve dedicated developers when needed

Due to the redistribution of the workload among team members at the scaling stage, it often becomes necessary to quickly add a developer to the project for a short time.

Dedicated developers are ideal for this purpose. Instead of hiring a full-time developer, you can manage your workload with far fewer resources if needed.

Dedicated developers are not an alternative to full-time developers; rather, they’re an “organic extension” of your team sharing the same project goals and objectives.

how managed teams work
rinf.tech Managed Team Framework

How to prepare for Team Scaling from a technical perspective

  • Plan infrastructure and product architecture

Sometimes team scaling does not lead to the desired results due to poor infrastructure and software architecture.

You start building new functionality and realize that the infrastructure can’t cope with the new load. Alternatively, the architecture can be designed in such a way that certain parts of the application simply stop functioning.

In this case, try implementing Kanban, which is perfect for visualizing the entire development process. Each employee can see what needs to be developed and when. In combination with daily standup meetings, this allows you to evenly distribute the workload among employees.

  • Apply coding best practices (code-driven development)

Your code quality directly affects the performance of the application. Therefore, in the initial stages, it is important to create a high-quality MVP. In the case of poor code quality, the project will turn into a nightmare at the scaling stage.

Ideally, MVPs should be created by experienced professionals who are well versed in the best practices of the chosen programming languages and tools.

Use common tools, libraries, and processes to increase overall productivity and reduce product support costs.

  • Create a dedicated team to make minor improvements

Team scaling significantly increases the time spent on fine adjustments. A separate team can be formed to solve this problem.

Change your team members every two weeks or once a month, gradually adding and removing developers from other teams. Do not change the whole team at once – better aim for a smooth transition. This will enable the rest of the teams to focus on the main tasks.

  • Use Pair Programming

To minimize the challenges of onboarding new team members, use pair programming. The essence of this technique is that a more experienced developer works together with a newcomer during the first weeks of the project. Collaboration allows a beginner to quickly get used to the processes, tools, and team style of writing company code. This helps flatten the learning curve and bring rookies up to speed fast and efficiently.

People should feel comfortable working together. When selecting developers, personal qualities and temperament should be taken into account. Otherwise, this approach will not work.

Shared codebases can be a real nightmare for new specialists joining your team. Diving into someone else’s code can take weeks if you don’t think about coding ahead of time while scaling software development teams will devour your team, not drive it forward.

The clearer your code is, the smoother your software development team will scale. Stick to your team-approved coding, be persistent in your code, and keep the logic clear so that any new developer can grasp the concept easily.

how team extension works
rinf.tech Team Extension Framework

Common mistakes to avoid when scaling a Software Team

  • Separating teams by areas of expertise

Separating teams by areas of expertise (front-end, back-end) is considered to be a bad idea because you don’t have a single team that could fully provide some kind of functional gain. This creates fragmentation, complicates communication, and makes teams dependent on each other.

  • Imposing personal responsibility on team members

There is no problem that each specialist in the team is responsible for personal tasks and areas of expertise. Problems begin when some part of the team has done its job and the second part is still working. Everyone on the team must understand that they are collectively responsible for their part of the product. Therefore, sometimes it is worth stepping out of your comfort zone to help the team achieve results on time.

  • Planning long sprints

Long sprints break the rhythm of software development. The optimal sprint duration is two weeks. Short sprints provide quick feedback and changes to the project, as well as give a sense of gradual, constant progress, leading to faster results.

  • Considering only hard skills when hiring software developers

No doubt, hard skills are important, but soft skills should not be underestimated.

When scaling, your teams will constantly change, as new people will come and someone will go, so it is important to select candidates with good soft skills who can adapt to changing conditions. 

Flexibility, curiosity, and the ability to work in a team and solve non-standard issues are as important as the knowledge of tools and programming languages.

  • Thinking that the more developers you have on your team, the faster you’ll build and deliver

This mistake is often found among “non-techies.” Application development is like building a house. Up to a certain point, an increase in the number of developers speeds up development, but there is a limit.

There’re several models that show how to optimally allocate resources in the course of a project. One of them is the optimal scheme of resource allocation based on the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO).

Conclusion

Tech team scaling is a process closely related to all processes taking place in the company. It shows how well-structured your company is and reveals problems that aren’t on the surface.

To scale your software development team smoothly and efficiently, you need a solid foundation in the form of corporate mission, vision, and culture, well-established processes, and a technical foundation that is ready to scale.

Looking for a technology partner?

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Related Articles

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]]> Squad-Based Product Development: Advantages and Challenges https://www.rinf.tech/squad-based-product-development-advantages-and-challenges/ Mon, 07 Mar 2022 17:39:14 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=17648 This article explores the concept of Squad-based product development (a.k.a. the Spotify model) and answers when it makes and doesn't make sense to use it.

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Squad-Based Product Development: Advantages and Challenges

When does it make sense to use the Spotify model for your software engineering project?

Software development organizations must change to meet the growing need for unique customer experiences and rapid innovation adoption.

Methods and concepts such as Enterprise Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile DevOps enable continuous design, delivery, and testing of new features. A good way to start change is to organize your product development teams into autonomous squads before coding.

This article will explore the concept of Squad-based product development (a.k.a. the Spotify model) and seek answers to the questions of when it makes and doesn’t make sense to use it.

Contents

From Waterfall to Agile to Squads

Waterfall is a very linear approach to building products. Much of the work is done upfront, with product managers working in a clear sequence of steps. First, they plan, design, and document just about anything they can think of concerning software product development. When done, they pass this documentation on to their developers for execution.

And while it is still a popular methodology in some large software development organizations, primarily because it allows for fixed scope, strict deadlines, and close managerial control, waterfall has a few drawbacks. Lack of change-making flexibility, poor focus on the end-user, delayed testing, and QA are just some of them. Therefore, in many software development organizations, waterfall product development has given way to agile development.

Agile development methodology emphasizes people over processes and communication and testing over documentation. When it comes to flexible thinking, this model encourages cooperation and proactivity. Within this model, success is defined by a working product and the user, not strict adherence to documentation and stages of development.

This is where the concept of product squads comes in as a relatively novel way of Agile method optimization.

What is the Spotify model, and how do Squads work?

Spotify is the world’s largest and most popular audio streaming subscription service, with around 286 million users. A key part of its success is due to the company’s unique approach to organizing teamwork and increasing team agility. As Spotify’s engineering teams went down the path of increased agility, they documented their experiences, shared them with the world, and ultimately influenced how many tech companies organize their work today. 

In some ways, Spotify’s approach to product development teams is the next logical step in further optimizing the agile method.

Just like a Scrum team, a Squad is a cross-functional, autonomous team (usually 6-12 people) that focuses on a single functional area. Each squad has a unique mission to focus on, an assigned agile coach to support them, and a product owner to guide them. The groups determine which agile methodology/structure to use for project delivery and management.

Product squads are responsible for the functional areas of a certain company’s technology product; they do not work with all products or individual projects assigned by management. For example, one squad may focus exclusively on machine learning, which allows the company to accumulate significant experience and intellectual capital in each functional area of this technology. In other words, using squads, you can build teams of real industry experts rather than one big team of programming generalists.

Another way product squads differ from traditional approaches to product development is that they are given real autonomy and can be considered standalone, independent startups.

Read More

In practical terms, the squad can choose the areas of functional responsibility on its own. Once it gets into that area—again, machine learning, for example—it can upgrade the production version of your tech product at any time and propose solutions without waiting for the approval of anyone outside the squad.

The basic idea is that squads can lead to much more efficient product development, speed up development cycles, and ultimately improve the quality of delivery and user experience.

Squads work with epics – groups of related user stories that describe higher levels of system functionality. An epic is the smallest element of implementation responsibility. The organization may use Kanban or other agile methods to manage and maintain the epics’ backlog, but the backlog must be continually updated and reprioritized daily.

One way to scale user stories is to make them implementable by pair programming – another distinctive feature of Squad-based development.

When all code is written in pairs, it is subject to constant code review, reducing or eliminating formal code reviews. The daily rotation of programmer pairs spreads knowledge about the system’s individual elements throughout the squad. The code is constantly read, reviewed, and revised as new user stories are implemented.

This practice has the added benefit of reducing dependence on any individual squad member. The use of pair rotation with test-driven development allows any squad member to confidently participate in a pair.

Pair programming can be a key benefit of the squad model for large organizations. As a squad gains experience and maturity, you can split it into two or more squads.

The senior member of the squad becomes the leader of the new squad, consisting of a few original squad members and a few newly trained developers. A new squad starts working on a new chunk of scope. The original squad also involves new developers to gain experience with the squad code as they work on epics in the original or linked snippet. Thus, the squad can grow quickly into a Tribe.

The Role of Testing in the Squad Model

In the squad model, the use of automated testing, test-driven development, and pair programming means you don’t need a robust testing workforce embedded into the team. Testers can become developers instead of acting only as a tester, while others use their deep domain knowledge as product owners.

Teams should follow test-driven development practices. Test-driven development requires you to write a test before writing code, using the concept of tests as specifications. This practice ensures that any member of the squad can understand the code. If developers can read the functional test suite, they can understand how a particular piece of code is implemented.

The test suite developed with this practice should cover all major forms of testing required: functional, user interface, and performance. Full implementation of automated testing can greatly improve code quality and significantly reduce the time spent on manual tests.

There is still a need for a smaller, more specialized testing team to conduct types of testing that require specialized skills, such as cross-device mobile testing, security, and end-to-end performance testing.

how squads work in software development

Image courtesy of Spotify

The benefits of the Squad-based development model

The organizational benefits of adopting the Spotify model include:

Accelerated development, feedback, and team learning

Since squads are authorized to release product updates directly to the market at any time, they can learn more quickly what works and what doesn’t. This can lead to autonomous improvements and help define faster if the product is working or needs to be fixed.

In-house expertise development

In a squad, a product manager has many more opportunities to learn about their functional area than when/if they are in charge of the entire product. For example, your product owner can become the ultimate technology expert on how machine learning or IoT can be used to improve product quality and overall user experience, generate new best practices and use cases, and stay on par with the industry trends.

By assigning squads to additional areas of functional responsibility across the entire product line, you can provide a wealth of knowledge to both product owners and developers. In fact, this can be a key differentiator for your business because your competitors will most likely still be using the everyone-works-on-everything model.

Less formal processes and ceremonies

The Spotify model focuses on organizing work, not necessarily processes and ceremonies. This gives the organization much flexibility regarding how squads work. Instead of requiring squads to change how they do their job (e.g., “you have to scrum”), it focuses on aligning them with each other and achieving individual team results.

Autonomy in decision-making

The Spotify model encourages autonomy and creativity by trusting people to do the work they see fit. It focuses on decentralizing decision-making and transferring responsibility to squads.

Better project transparency

The Spotify model can increase the transparency of the work and expand the experimental approach to problem-solving in a high-trust environment. This can lead to things like better products, happier customers, and more engaged employees. However, not everyone will experience these results.

Are you looking to leverage Squad-based product development or build a highly efficient Dedicated Team in Eastern Europe?

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Challenges of Squad-based development

There are several legitimate reasons why product groups might not make sense for your organization.

There’s a risk of breaking your internal product knowledge into silos

In an agile context, the primary role of a product manager is to inform developers about the user personas and the problems the product needs to solve for those personas. In other words, product managers must have a complete understanding of the product as a whole.

However, if you break down your resources into functional area squads, you’ll essentially share overall product knowledge at a strategic level across multiple product owners. While they can become consummate experts in their respective functional areas, these product owners will most likely not have a complete strategic understanding of the entire product and its lifecycle. It can be risky for your project’s success.

Also, by making your developers hyper-specialists in several functional areas, without allowing them to work on other projects from time to time, you risk isolating the talent from the bird-eye view of your product. So if your squads don’t interact well and often with each other, you risk getting an information bunker.

Your product may not support the Spotify model

Because the product squad approach was developed and popularized by a SaaS company, it’s best-fit for Cloud-based projects.

What if you have several related products, and they are built so that an update to one part of the product can affect other parts?

You probably wouldn’t want to restructure your product development and management team into squads because their updates might compromise the stability of the rest of the product.

Also, if your product has many interdependent components, you will often have cases where one squad will have to wait for support from another squad. And that, in the first place, would eliminate much of the value of working in the squad.

You may lose advocacy from both PM and development perspectives

One more reason why squad-based development may not work for you is that the success of a product often depends on maintaining some distance and objectivity between product management and development. The product owner must focus on the vision, strategy, and roadmap, while the development team must focus on execution.

Developers will be motivated to solve their tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. But sometimes, the product manager will have strategic reasons for pursuing an initiative in a predetermined way that may be against the way the development team is thinking.

But suppose the product manager is on the same team as the developers. In that case, you run the risk of them not asking for X because they know that the framework will make it easy to implement Y within their team’s functional area of responsibility.

The same potential problem exists when assigning a product manager to a development team.

A product is more likely to succeed when both product managers and developers strongly advocate for what they think is best for it, even if it creates some tension between both teams.

Software Development Services: the Most Used Collaboration Models

Read more

Final thoughts

Product squads are a great way to build strong and knowledgeable development teams.

They also offer what is arguably the best development environment, allowing companies to build and release products quickly and efficiently and then improve them based on user feedback.

Moreover, they seem to be a logical extension of the agile philosophy. Indeed, one of the most important agile principles is: “Self-organizing teams create the best architectures, requirements, and projects.”

And remember, agile development itself is all about doing what works best, not sticking to any development process or rule.

If the product squad approach is right for your organization, it might be worth a try.

But if you’re not sure to what extent your product can handle independent updates at different times, or you’re worried about sacrificing general product knowledge to build your organization’s functional experience, then you might want to take a deeper dive into the squad method first. Implementing the wrong product development strategy can create more problems than it solves.

We at rinf.tech have been building Managed and Dedicated Dev Teams and Squads for other businesses across different industries for 15+ years now. Over this time, we've learned important lessons, and accumulated best practices and tribal knowledge, which makes us well-placed to guarantee your software project success. Contact us to learn more.

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

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]]> How Tech Partnerships Help SMBs Stay Ahead of the Innovation Curve https://www.rinf.tech/how-tech-partnerships-help-smbs-stay-ahead-of-the-innovation-curve/ Fri, 03 Dec 2021 16:42:48 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=15769 This article addresses how tech partnerships help small and mid-sized companies embark on custom software development journeys and adopt innovation efficiently.

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How Tech Partnerships Help SMBs Stay Ahead of the Innovation Curve

As the world slowly starts waking up after endless months of the pandemic, you have to wonder, how many made it? How did businesses survive this unprecedented event in human history? How were small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) able to persevere?

Long answer short, many didn’t make it. The businesses that did, for the most part, ensured business continuity and resilience due to technology innovation.

Contents

How Tech Partnerships Provide a Competitive Advantage

In spring 2020, digitally transformed businesses quickly adapted and were able to “keep calm and carry on.” For example, the SMBs who were already on the Cloud and leveraging cutting-edge technologies were able to run their operation remotely.

Others were probably some of the hundreds of thousands of businesses that shut their doors for good (and we’re still feeling the repercussions today).

Naturally, enterprises that previously failed to jump on the digital transformation wagon rushed to move up to the Cloud. According to a recent study, as much as 45% of SMBs surveyed were thinking about digital transformation. Another 28% had already started digitizing their processes and operations.

But at the same time, almost half stated that the steep learning curve continued to be a massive barrier to adoption. Although this can be pretty overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. The good news is that solid tech partnerships can help SMBs stay a step ahead in the innovation curve.

The ability of SMBs to identify and collaborate with technology partners is a competitive advantage (on its own). This is especially true when creating new growth business models and, of course, creating robust digital workspaces where the job gets done.

How Tech Partnerships Make a Difference When It Comes To Corporate Innovation

Technology Partners Compliment Your Goals and Values

Successful partnerships often come down to shared common characteristics, values, and desires that allow both to be successful, topical, and ever-evolving. Together, you can strategize, plan, and focus on your immediate and long-term objectives.

SMBs should also have an in-depth understanding of unit economics, natural churn, and so on. For example, they must decide between higher customer retention costs versus the lower cost of acquisition. This is especially true if you’re building applications for your target market.

Tech Partners Help Identify Your Pertinent Problems and Solve Them Effectively

Thriving ecosystems depend on an in-depth understanding of the business model, customer base, and potential problems and barriers. One of the most common problems small and mid-sized businesses are facing today is security, and a tech partner can help solve that problem.

In a rapidly evolving threat landscape, off-the-shelf security solutions alone can’t help fortify your infrastructure. Sometimes, you might need the help of smart algorithms and security specialists you couldn’t usually afford, and your tech partner will be able to fill those gaps.

So, if you have customer-facing or internal enterprise apps, it’s critical to secure them to ensure privacy, regulatory compliance, and of course, keep your brand name out of the headlines.

Although corporate giants can weather the storm that comes after a data breach, for many SMBs, a single data breach can annihilate the whole business.

Tech Partners Provide Access to Top Tech Talent and Technologies

Collaboration with your development partner at any level enables access to external expert knowledge and experience. It also provides access to cutting-edge tools and technologies that can propel your company to the next level.

SMBs also get to benefit from extensive experience and the latest technologies without all the HR headaches or overheads that go with it. As you can count on your tech partner’s in-house experts and extensive networks, SMBs can accelerate innovation significantly.

The added advantage of collaborating is learning from your partner’s experience working on similar projects. They will be able to guide you and alert you to potential hurdles that lie ahead, and find innovative ways to avoid them. This means that small businesses won’t have to waste their time trying to get around issues that already have robust solutions.

Established development partners also enable access to the latest and emerging technologies, including next-generation digital products and services—this provides SMBs with the necessary tools to compete in the marketplace with corporate giants.

In this case, SMBs can become far more agile than their corporate competitors. Tech partnerships also empower smaller players to take calculated risks and disrupt the marketplace confidently. However, it’s crucial to always focus on the process instead of potential results.

As things often change during the software development lifecycle (SDLC), SMBs must be open and flexible enough to adapt to their partner’s expert advice. While this might mean that you end up something completely different at the end of the project, it also means that the company was agile enough to be successful.

 

Tech Partners Help Optimize Resources & Save Costs

Successful partnerships open the doors to endless opportunities. Although you may have started with one project, you can always extend your collaboration when you begin identifying new prospects to scale and grow your business.

Most small businesses don’t have the necessary resources to attract top tech talent or the latest technologies. But when SMBs and technology partners pool their resources together, the potential of achieving meaningful is significant.

SMBs can also benefit from their partner’s extensive network to achieve meaningful growth and gain a competitive advantage. If you do it correctly, small businesses can sustain and scale their offering without significant capital expenditure (for example, hardware and software investments, infrastructure, new hires, etc.).

Whenever you augment in-house teams with external developers, you also help your staff improve. For example, your development partner can train in-house staff to get them up to speed or even teach them something completely new.

As you’ve probably guessed, all the above leads to significant cost savings. This is especially true if you’re outsourcing your software development project to Eastern Europe. For example, you can work with an Extended Team of top tech talent based in Romania and Ukraine at a cost that’s significantly lower than your local market rates. As you’re paying the local market rate in those countries, it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

If you’re wondering if you need a technology partner, ask yourself this question: are you ready for the fourth industrial revolution? Web 3.0 is here, and the wheels are already turning with smart sensors, cryptocurrencies, and of course, the metaverse.

In Summary

If you’re wondering if you need a technology partner, ask yourself this question: are we ready for the fourth industrial revolution? Web 3.0 is here, and the wheels are already turning with smart sensors, cryptocurrencies, and of course, the metaverse.

Will you be able to compete? Will you be able to stand out and stand apart in an increasingly crowded marketplace?

If your answer is no, a tech partner might be the right path to ensure business relevance. After all, working with a technology partner is a cost-effective approach to accelerate time to market, which is imperative to stay ahead of the curve.

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

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