Where the friction is on the road from discipline-first to squad-first identity, the annual cadence that lets teams figure out the rest, and 4 books on teams that hold.
Most product orgs are somewhere on the road from discipline-first identity to squad-first identity, and this year’s tooling pushed ours a good way down it. Designers with a few months of agent experience are more confident, and they also know where the swim lanes are changing, which is the part I didn’t expect. The framing an engineering leader gave us, and that I keep repeating, is that nobody wants you to become an engineer; we’re blurring the edges so everyone does a little more in the other lanes, and there’s still a ton of expertise in each discipline we don’t want to lose. A senior leader put the destination in a line I’ve been thinking about ever since: the first-team notion is that your squad is who you spend time with. You’ll still hang out with your discipline. These are your BFFs.
The friction shows up in who people have actually met. There are squads where a designer has been on the team for months and has met only the tech lead, because the tech leads are protective of their engineers’ time, which I understand. There are squads where the designer meets only their PM partner, and the PM does all of the engineering engagement on their behalf. That works right up until the designer needs to ship something themselves, which, this year, is most weeks. Where it’s working, the reason is direct contact: our mobile team feels like one team because the designer talks to the engineers directly and the PM works behind the scenes, and one area that had to work across every one of its squads to land a big launch this year came out of it collaborating more deeply as a side effect. Forcing functions work. The question a peer asked me this week, which I didn’t have a clean answer for, is how you get there without the forcing function.
Set the cadence, and then let the teams figure out the rest for themselves.
The closest thing I have is a cadence I’ve seen work at a couple of previous companies. Once a year, everyone is in the room: leaders lay out the vision, the values, and the goals, then each business unit lead shares what they’re building against them, with go-to-market, technology, and design all there. That’s the only all-hands gathering. After it, offsites are small and cross-functional, one per squad or pillar, each with its own budget, and they exist for team building. If 2 teams have dependencies, that’s a working session, scattered through the year as needed, and a working session is not an offsite. To answer the question of what leaders actually do, it’s setting up that cadence and then letting the teams figure out the rest for themselves.
That’s the long-term shape. The near-term move, between now and the next kickoff, is subtler. It’s fine to keep the discipline-specific rituals, the crits and the warm-ups and the reviews, because some of them are unique enough to a craft that they need a discipline leader above them. What has to change is the narrative inside them: the same story, translated. More technical for data science and engineering, more whimsical for design, the same thing underneath. And communicate that story visually, as a timeline where the disciplines converge into one line with who’s taking point, because a document that’s a wall of words from leadership won’t get read. People need the visual their leaders point to when they speak, and the document behind it for the details.
Four books on teams that hold, for anyone making the same trip.
The shelf
