Keeping your team in shape and minimize silos as your team grows

Seperation of tasks and thinking in silos is something natural and human. It happens all the time when teams and companies grow. Hands down we all encountered this.

As long as we have awareness and the willpower to tackle problems in the same way as small teams would do it (even if we become a larger team over time) and keeping communication up across all teams we grow stronger.

I will talk about how we work in our team at Amazee Labs and what I encountered in prior companies which I worked for (i.e. goverment, agencys with huge growth) and what went haywire during this time and what worked out pretty well.

For example just trying to copy successful patterns like the guild system from Spotify onto existing team structures did not work out that well.

Establishing a culture of sharing knowledge and keeping teams spread across different countries is also a thing we established in our company culture. This means sometimes spending some hours in your evening or morning hours to discuss topics with your team across timezones.

(So expect a 'cultural' insight in situations I encountered over time and how I personally encountered solving it)

Bastian works as Development and Operations Engineer at Amazee Labs Zurich. His job is to keep servers fast and customers happy.

Before joining Amazee Labs he worked for the Web Agency Liip AG as Scrummaster with the Web Operations Team. Even longer ago he wrapped his head around Enterprise Content Management Migration Projects for Canton of Berne. He dedicates a lot of time to organizing TEDxBern and chairs the DevOps Track for DrupalCon Amsterdam (amsterdam2014.drupal.org).

When Bastian is not doing anything closely related to computers he is piloting his paraglider through the swiss alps, traveling around the world or skating around on his longboard.