Modern problems require modern solutions, right?
The problem is, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand what solutions are required for a given problem and even harder to task a team with finding them.
That’s why Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, thinks the top-down management model is dead. To replace it, Bob is championing a “team-of-teams” model that provides his developers with far more autonomy - so much, in fact, that they can even self-elect their leaders.
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Bob discusses the challenges of software development in an increasingly dynamic environment, why he believes developers should be no further than 4 steps away from their CEO and the historical challenges of connecting results in Silicon Valley to those in the federal government.
Who would've expected a federal government tech integrator (Science Applications International Corporation), to be on the leading edge of developer autonomy?
Episode Highlights Include:
- (4:19) Team-of-teams model vs top-down leadership
- (10:17) Devs self-electing their team leads
- (15:21) Why no position should be more than 4 steps from the CEO
- (20:29) Invest in your teams until it hurts
- (34:00) Treat hiring like sports organizations treat the draft
- (35:45) Historical challenge of connecting results in Silicon valley to results in the federal government
You're Invited to INTERACT on April 7th
Join engineering leaders from Netflix, Slack, Stack Overflow, American Express & more at LinearB's virtual engineering leadership conference, INTERACT on April 7th, 2022.
1 day, 20 speakers, 1,000s of engineering leaders - all driven by the Dev Interrupted community. If you are a team lead, engineering manager, VP or CTO looking to improve your team, this is the conference for you!
Oldest comments (1)
Team of teams model definitely seems like a concept pulled from the military. Interesting to see it applied to dev teams.