Wondering what companies out there: -Have dedicated, persistently funded product teams with all members needed to do the work embedded in the team. There should be no/minimal dependencies on other teams or shared services. Teams should be mostly engineers and whatever else is absolutely needed (UX, Product, Data Science). Ideally no project managers or non-engineer analysts -Have cultures where leaders and managers are expected to allow teams to make their own decisions without micromanaging the work or overruling the decisions of the team. The focus of leadership roles is to set teams up for success, not overrule their decisions. -Strong practice of continuous learning/improvement for both product decisions and ways of working. Most product decisions are supported by evidence and occasionally reversed based on evidence. -Typically ship small increments of work quickly instead of in big batches. Minimal up front time commitments or estimations. -Not dogmatic about scrum practices. Probably lean more towards Kaban with some lightweight scrum stuff mixed in. -Make industry leading products that are proven to achieve results. Good technical practices like feature flags, automated testing, etc. -Bonus points for being a company with multiple different product lines/teams as the above is easier to achieve when you are a tiny startup. Two examples of companies that fit this criteria would probably be Valve and Spotify (Maybe parts of FAANG?) but I am wondering what other examples are out there.
AWS. But not the rest of Amazon.
How different is AWS vs the rest of Amazon?
AWS customers are other developers, Amazon customers are people shopping for things. This is the big difference. AWS is almost all engineers, with an emphasis on maximizing the amount of code being pushed to prod. Amazon is a mix of engineers and MBAs, with an emphasis on optimizing the website by testing small adjustments. I could go into more detail but I think you’ll understand. The most important problem in AWS is you don’t really get to sleep while oncall. The most important problem in Amazon is you’re just writing if statements and for loops and it’s very boring.