Identifying boundaries between teams

Last week we talked about the challenge of consistency versus autonomy when creating teams. This week I want to delve deeper into the topic of identifying team boundaries.

When designing teams you often end up with dependencies between teams at the tech stack level (teams divided by customer journey), or having dependencies at a feature level (teams divided by tech stack). Having autonomous teams with no dependencies at either the code or feature level is the ideal - but how do you achieve it?

This is where Domain-Driven Design can help. It is a software design approach that includes techniques for dividing up a system into separate autonomous parts - exactly what we’re looking for.

While Domain-Driven Design sounds very technical there is a workshop technique called Event Storming that will be very familiar to Product, UX and Design people. It helps business reps, stakeholders and technical teams to get a quick overview of the full end-to-end business process and also helps identifies the logical break-points in the process.

I go into more detail about how Event Storming works in the Identifying Boundaries between Teams link below.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

The Route To Better Culture? Better Managers by Bruce Daisley
Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Engaged managers lead to higher team engagement, improved profits, customer service, and retention.

Identifying Boundaries between Teams by Rory Madden
Dependencies remove autonomy, which removes accountability. Therefore designing teams to be autonomous is critical.

Product Direction

The Product Model in Traditional IT by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones
For the product model to work the IT department needs to own both the outcome and the delivery. It doesn’t work if you are just delivering features or outsourcing delivery.

No, You Can't Just Empower Product Teams by Rory Madden
Rory shares the changes that need to be made to empower teams, both within the team itself as well as outside.

Continuous Discovery

The Agentic Era of UX by Alex Klein
The future of digital experience is here—but it’s being minced into microscopic use cases.

Designing for Different Personality Types by Maria Panagiotidi
Maria shares strategies for assessing user personality and how you can adapt your UI to the different personality traits.

Continuous Design

Design + AI: An Expert’s Take on How They Work Together by Krish Arora
Figma’s Head of Insights Andrew Hogan shares his insights on the impact of design + AI.

Content Strategy vs. UX Writing by Anna Kaley
Content strategy focuses on content-related processes, while UX writing shapes user experiences through text. The two disciplines work in harmony.

Continuous Delivery

10 Things Software Developers Should Learn About Learning by Abi Noda
A scientific understanding of how human memory, learning, and problem solving work.

Dear AWS, Please Let Me Be A Cloud Engineer Again by Luc van Donkersgoed
Every single session at AWS Re:Invent was around AI. But there is still a lot of improvements people are waiting for in infrastructure.

UXDX EMEA Prices Increase

Want to save hundreds on your ticket to UXDX EMEA? Now is your chance.

In-Person tickets from: €619
Online tickets from €279

Join us for our last year in Dublin - we’re pulling out all of the stops to make it a great year!

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

Story Driven Innovation

Raphaël shares how designing complex systems in the energy industry parallels the process of writing and producing a musical. This talk will inspire you to understand, and take advantage of, the link between different domains and to apply storytelling principles to create impactful user experiences.

As a bonus second video (because the link didn’t work last week - sorry about that), here is Richards conversation about how they are managing their 300 teams at Verizon👇👇

Job of the Week

Brand Designer
Priceline
📌 Toronto

About Priceline
Priceline is an online travel agency that offers a wide range of travel services, including booking flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Which is more important to you?

It was a tie between consistency across channels and autonomy of teams at 22% each. The people who wanted both are technically higher at 34% but there was a split between those who would achieve that with bigger teams or with smaller scope.

This is why it is so difficult to define the boundaries for teams. There are hard tradeoffs to be made. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. In the main section this week I have shared my preferred technique for helping teams to identify the boundaries but even so, tough decisions around consistency between channels needs to be made.

Fortunately there has been some developments that are making things easier. Technologies like React Native, htmx and WASM means that teams can share more code across channels making it easier to support more. I think we’ll see the trend of single languages being able to support more channels continue and the scope for teams continue with them.