Product Teams, the Wonder Drug for Burnout* (* take as directed)

If you organize your company around functional role rather than products, you may be causing more problems than you solve. There is a better way.

Building teams is a fundamental requirement for building and running large applications. Employee retention is one of the most significant challenges that management experiences, often because of balancing engagement against burnout. Yet, our companies need to keep running their existing services, while building new features.

I will cover the ways that organizing around product teams rather than functional roles will:

• keep people engaged with a high degree of ownership,
• prevent burnout, attrition, and feelings of disempowerment by keeping authority aligned with responsibility,
• allow the company to make informed decisions when new features may be built and run,
• enable the company to determine when more capacity needs to be added to teams, or when the team has the capacity to take on more products,
• prevent applications from becoming orphaned or “Legacy”.

You will learn why organizing around job function rather than products causes more problems than it solves, as well as some of the pitfalls that must be negotiated or avoided when making a transition to a product-oriented structure.

Learning Objectives: How organizing your teams around products will help build more resilient applications, retain your employees by keeping them engaged, prevent applications from becoming “Legacy”, and allow you to make informed decisions about work capacity.

Alternate Title: “Building Products Sustainably with Resilient Teams”