Can you even centralize?

So, there’s this thing in many companies I’ve been with lately where I see more and more organizations split by function. Previously, it felt like the common case was to split teams by feature (or maybe this was just a trend in companies I was in at the time?).

Anyway, this means that I’ve started to notice some rather interesting dynamics.

What is a domain?

Usually, even if you have a “functionally split” organization - someone or some team has responsibility or ownership over domains. It makes sense to have a clear point of contact for features within “login”, “subscriptions” or “search” whenever something comes up, right?

Well - if you are split by function you might have to have a contact person in backend for login, and another one in frontend..

So what can you do?

I don’t think there’s a good way or a bad way to do this, but clear ownership is for sure a prerequisite for great products. You might have to enforce a bit of a t-shape to your teams, where even the search team can implement their own interface if that is necessary for them to take full ownership.

But doesn’t that go against the functional split?

Yes. Yes it does.

Sometimes both life and development is harder than just following a set of rules. Hire great people, give them clear responsibilities and let them improve the situations. Things will happen differently.

Sometimes better, sometimes worse!

Out