Small Focused Teams

Small teams are happy and productive teams. Structuring engineering teams at scale and keeping them productive can be quite challenging, although the recent DevOps movement has proven itself valuable to maintaining a productive team size for building and operating applications. Structuring engineering teams so that the developers are involved in the operations and are accountable for them has clear benefits in effectiveness. Applying this model to a very large application can be quite challenging, or nearly impossible. It’s much easier to have developers involved and sharing the operational responsibilities of the applications they are developing with smaller services.

Small individual services are ideally sized so that a team is able to take ownership of the complete service from design to operations. The isolation of the services maintains fairly clear lines or responsibility and ownership for the service. The responsibilities and concerns for the features of the service are easier to manage, as are the teams that are accountable for them. New developers joining a team can ramp up very quickly as they only need to understand a very small service.