Nature analogies in Engineering

Bees are amazing. Organic. Like dev teams… Go with me for a minute on this. 

We have to humbled by the beauty and complexity of nature. We can learn the lessons nature has to share with us. When a hive is successful creates more food supply in the form of honey. When it does this more and more bees are created to the point where there are too many for a single hive to support them. The hive needs to split into two.

For a growing organisation to strive, it needs to create more tomorrow than it does today. Elsewhere I have talked about “building the machine that builds the machine” while finding efficiency is one path, this blog tackles the other path; when you need to take on more people and strive to remain as effective (or preferably more so) than before.

Dev teams therefore are the same as bee hives. A successful dev team creates enough business value and backlog that it needs to add more and more people. If it’s making enough business impact then more developers will be added until there are too many for a happily functioning team. It’s time to split it. Create a replica that understands the same rules, knows the same landscapes, the same ways of working.

Splitting the hive to grow

The leadership challenge is to make sure you maintain fully functioning hives teams at all times while you do the split. What that means to you is going to be unique to your industry and company, but in my experience you would need the following:

• People leadership - someone to set the new team administration up and someone can to maintain capability on the old team. Someone to keep an eye on the trains and make sure everything gets to “delivered”.
• Tech leadership - someone to support the team’s technical decisions, to mentor the less senior developers technically and to scout out the problems around the problems.
• Product leadership - someone to weigh the new and old backlogs, to drive focus on extracting maximum business value from all that hard development work.

In different situations you may have some exceptional individuals who can serve more than one of these roles for a while to get you up and running. Embrace that and allow people the space to dabble in different areas as makes sense.

Spreading your existing culture

The opportunity you have at your disposal right now is to hire individuals into opened up and new roles in the midst of the existing culture. The alternative is to hire a completely new team. Doing the latter will almost certainly create an “othered” team who see themselves as outside of the rest of the culture.

This is an approach at your disposal. However, as someone who has coached and witnessed how tough it can be to integrate numerous cultures together, I would suggest the full integration approach.

Using the expectation of growth for good

I would encourage you to take a moment to reflect on how beautiful this situation is; your organisation is growing and While it’s stressful and touch in the moment, being part of an organisation that is growing like this is not always the case. This is a dream growth model within which to lead engineering groups.

This method of growth allows you to do the following:

• Engineer looking for promotion? You’ve just created roles for them to grow into!
• Missing key skills in an existing team? You’ve just created the space to pull those skills in!
• Mis-titled/hired employee? You can use this split to allow an engineer to move into a role that better suits them.

  Example; Creating room for successful promotion

  By setting expectations that internal growth and promotion from within is the norm, aspiring senior and staff level engineers can positively channel those ambitions to stand up for what will be the next opportunity. There might not be room for them as it stands today, but by creating a new team for whom a tech lead role needs to exist, you can create the avenue for promotion.

When the opportunity to create a new team arises we push them to help found the new hive, ahem, team. By presenting the new tech lead with a set of colleagues who already know the ways of working and who can already work in support of them, you set them up for success.