End to end product ownership
Last updated: 13 September 2024
Engineering teams will follow a product-centric approach. They will form part of an enduring multidisciplinary team, with full-stack and full-lifecycle ownership, from application build through to the ongoing operation and iteration of services in the ‘Live’ phase.
Rationale
As digital services become more intertwined with our core business we need to be able to quickly adapt our digital products in response to change requests from the business. Following this, the Home Office DDaT Strategy directs us to be product-centric, basing our decisions on whether they will help users achieve their goal (outcomes).
Retaining an enduring and effective team that can quickly iterate on the product ensures that the product can continue to meet changing business needs, and creates incentives to write high quality software that can be easily maintained over a long period of time. This also helps to reduce the need for large-scale rework and expensive replacement programmes.
Giving teams ownership and autonomy, and aligning them appropriately with value streams, allows them to focus on delivering business outcomes. Improved delivery and focus on product-centricity is enabled through stream-aligned teams having the burden on them reduced by other teams, for example by platform teams providing self-service solutions to common requirements.
Applications and Implications
- Think in terms of products instead of projects. Unlike projects, products should be iterated on for the long-term
- Consider Team Topologies - align products, teams and architecture to allow sustained delivery of value streams
- Product teams own components, tests, deployment and configuration, infrastructure as code, reliability, processes and documentation