Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once. The central idea is this: We identify the necessary user experience domains for our products We identify the shared product domains that underpin multiple user experience domains We organize engineering into three layers, the top two correspond to the above domains and the third provides infrastructure.
I’m a sucker for organizational design theory. I like the model, and I also wonder how it best maps to a smaller organization, where teams will own multiple domains.