How Microteams Change the Way We Collaborate. Again • Sander Hoogendoorn • GOTO 2021

[@7th_CAV_Trooper]

I've been preaching many of these ideas for years. I love seeing them collected into a brilliant presentation. I will be sharing it with everyone I encounter!

[@PaulSebastianM]

Sander is a dream manager. 😊

[@l_combo]

This is brilliant, I love how frank the message it! People will be quite confronted with some of these thoughts! I wish there was more open and honest conversations around these topics, sadly people and executives in particular look for obvious / complicated solutions and frameworks from large consultants to give them the illusion of control.

[@DeBoerVan]

Great insights. Micro teams, micro steps :) The ways we naturally work, agile is the natural state we exists. Small, smaller. Stop doing projects.

[@rolfingbomb]

That actually makes a lot of sense.

[@DerylSpielman]

Fantastic ideas and practice. Unanswered questions: Who and where does this "set of small problems" come from? Isn't there a need to organize these small problems to build cohesiveness and great user experiences or products? Isn't there a need for consistency in who is on these micro teams especially client-facing teams? Clients want relationships with people, not new people all of the time. Are you suggesting micro teams only for technology teams since that is all you mention? What about small problems that are completely repeatable like daily/monthly client deliverables?

[@DerylSpielman]

We can't forget the transaction cost of shorter delivery. Sometimes doing things in smaller batches means increasing the frequency, which means more transaction costs of delivery. Micro costs of small transactions add up to a large overall sum if not focusing on constantly reducing these costs. Think about microservice architectures and the tradeoffs as well. With increased autonomy and scalability and smaller services comes a new cost of operational complexity. Operating in microteams can have this same issue and in fact can form functional silos without any real cross-cutting view across microteams. Then you need microteams on top of the microteams to create another layer of abstraction that pieces together the spaghetti of microteams. I believe it's a great concept and talk but perhaps missing some key points to address like potential costs and pitfalls.

[@patricklepoutre]

Interesting approach for shorter delivery. I always thought good software emerged from rock band size teams rather than orchestra

[@judas1337]

Didn’t Moore’s Law stop being applicable during the last decade? Also we are moving towards 6 mainframe computers with the prominent being AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle and perhaps Alibaba.

[@frederikclaus7257]

I don't see any meaningful insights (basically preaching the agile manifesto). Most competent developers I have spoke to, know that Scrum is broken, but Management is able to use it as a selling point and "everybody is doing it". The biggest flaw is at the core of the talk. The so called "microteams". To me it seems, that he has fallen to a fallacy he himself repeated multiple times in his talk: "This worked for XY, but you're not XY". This is what he (basically) says at the end (about this microteam pattern): "This pattern worked for us for the last 8 years, you might want to try that".

[@7th_CAV_Trooper]

Yeah, "you might want to try that" and maybe it will work and maybe it won't. You don't see any meaningful insights? Really? I wish you could spend a week with me to see how my client operates and then you could tell me if you think they might benefit from this information that might seem very obvious to you, but, trust me, it is not so obvious to most.