Product solution design is driven from within development teams

Description

Push design authority to the teams. Conversely, avoid making design decisions externally and then imposing them on teams.

With "design" we mean every activity related to product development:

• Architecting
• Interaction design
• Development
• Testing
• Security
• Information models
• Deploy in production
• Operations
• ...

Rationale

Devolving design authority to the teams will have the following impacts:

• Increase motivation, autonomy and engagement of teams
• Engage and harness the scale and diversity of the combined cognitive capability of the teams
• Increase speed and quality of learning through fast feedback on the consequences of design decisions

A common approach to harmonise design across multiple teams at scale is to centralise the design work. This leads to reduced team autonomy and empowerment and degrades the emergent quality of design in a complex product.

To support a decentralised emergent design process, consider the following:

• A regular cadence of joint inter-team design workshops to evolve the overall design, agree boundaries and recognise interdependent concepts.
• Regularly review and evolve how the local and wider product design supports the Quality Dimensions see Invest in quality.
• Clarify the scope of team empowerment and boundaries within which to operate.

Related Principles

• Optimise Speed and Quality of Learning
• Invest in quality
• Technical leaders as coaches, mentors and community leaders
• Support autonomy with clear boundaries
• Organise around value streams
• Favour Teams with broader Solution Accountability
• Favour Teams with broader Business Domain Competence
• Maximise the Scope of Product Increment
• Shared context improves decisions
• Maximise Team autonomy
• Limit Team Mental Workload - Contending