Design an Engineering Organization Structure
Design an organizational structure for scaling an engineering team from 20 to 200 engineers while maintaining velocity.
Apply Team Topologies principles, define clear ownership boundaries, and implement communication patterns.
How do you avoid Conways Law working against you?
Consider how teams should interact
Think about career paths in different structures
Engineering Managers must design organizations that scale without creating bureaucracy or silos.
quality
Incident rate, customer satisfaction
delivery
Deployment frequency, lead time
team health
Surveys, retrospectives
20 50
focus
Establish culture and practices
structure
2-4 cross-functional teams
challenges
Generalists to specialists transition
50 100
focus
Introduce platform thinking
structure
Multiple pods/tribes
challenges
Communication overhead, alignment
100 200
focus
Autonomy with alignment
structure
Full team topologies implementation
challenges
Consistency, knowledge sharing, career paths
- •Reorgs for the sake of reorgs
- •Too many layers of management
- •Unclear ownership boundaries
- •Platform teams without customer focus
enabling
Teams helping others adopt new capabilities
platform
Teams providing internal infrastructure
stream aligned
Teams aligned to business domain/value stream
complicated subsystem
Teams owning complex technical components
guilds
Cross-team communities of practice
tech leads
Technical leadership separate from management
architecture council
Cross-cutting technical decisions
conways law
Organization structure mirrors system architecture
inverse conway
Design org to get desired architecture
interaction modes
- •Collaboration
- •X-as-a-Service
- •Facilitation