Introducing engineering team design
New engineering managers rarely have the opportunity to directly choose a team design, but regardless of where you are in your manager journey, having awareness of team design concepts can help to orient you and reveal solutions to problems. Depending on your work context and goals, team design can make a big difference in your team’s productivity and performance. To that end, let’s start by learning some of the most common software development team designs and how they operate.
Common team structures
Software development organizations structure their teams in different ways to meet organizational needs. In terms of reporting hierarchies, these are the most common approaches for team structure:
- Functionally aligned teams are grouped by a particular skill, which may be a technology or type of work, such as an iOS development team or an infrastructure engineering team
- Product aligned teams have members who are dedicated...
