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Working Together as Embedded Engineering Teams

What Is the Embedded Model?

Companies need specialists, and specialists often do their work with people outside their department. For example, all these specialties work with software engineers:

  • Designers
  • Product managers
  • Site reliability engineers (SREs)
  • Quality engineers (QA)
  • Application security engineers
  • Architects

Specialists often apply the most leverage when they work next to engineers. For example, an SRE might help a team improve its monitoring. They might help even more if they help the team to understand how to do monitoring themselves. A designer might work side by side with an engineering team. They design future features and collaborate on current features.

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Platform Teams and the Self-Service Model

Self-service is arguably the most important team coordination model you can use. If you are a leader in any moderately complex engineering organization, you should be actively pushing for self-service. Otherwise, you’re making a problem for someone else to clean up.

What Is the Self-Service Model?

In a team that adopts self-service:

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Hierarchy = The Matrix: We Don’t See or Question It

The Matrix is real, my friends.

The hierarchy is at the very center of our lives. We have experienced it in our school years and later when working in organizations. It’s existence and function is tacit in our understanding of reality.

At the Agile Alliance Change Agents workshop, it became clear to me that the existence of hierarchy was greatly influencing the sessions. I sensed that there were two broad themes that emerged: