Development Team Structure Retrospective (January to May 2015)

Tadashi Shigeoka ·  Sat, May 30, 2015

Since the structure of the Front&Contents team I belong to will change starting in June, I looked back at the structure from January to May 2015.

* The Front&Contents team develops all user-facing functionality

Development Team Structure

The team structure was like the diagram below.

Development Team Structure Retrospective (January to May 2015) | dev_team-201501-201505

Product owner

  • Marketing
  • UI/UX
  • (COO)

Development team

  • Programmer (Lead) ← myself
  • Programmer
  • Programmer
  • Programmer (Partner)
  • Designer

It was a team with 3 Product owners (PO) including the COO, 4 Programmers, and 1 Designer.

What Went Well

  • We could work on both marketing initiatives to increase sales and UI/UX initiatives to improve user experience within the same team
  • Development and design resources were aligned, and work could be completed within the team alone

What Went Poorly

  • The Programmer (Lead) tended to become a single point of failure (SPOF)
  • With many POs, it was difficult to have the POs coordinate priorities among themselves

Future Development Structure

Starting in June, we’ll focus on developing email functionality with a small team structure of 1 PO (Marketing) and 2 Programmers.

Compared to before, mobility will increase, so I want to run the development cycle faster.

That’s all from the Gemba.