03 Feb 2015
A big chunk of the industry still thinks it’s a good idea to split product development between different teams.
It’s not.
Users don’t care about frontend or backend, they care about working software that solves problems.
There shouldn’t be different front and back teams. There should be a product team that delivers working software. There’s no product with one but not the other.
At the end of the first sprint I’d rather have one feature implemented across the full stack rather than 3 features in the front implemented against a mocked backend and a backend that has implemented only one of the features the fronted needs but that has a plan to scale to 1m users.
A backend team doesn’t need to implement anything else other than what’s required to drive the frontend. The rest is potential waste and likely to reduce the chances of becoming potentially shippable as soon as possible. Integration phases simply postpone unfinished work since you can’t ship without integration.
Please note that a product team can be made out of people from different companies. What’s important is that they work with a shared vision, roadmap, communication channels and objectives.
So here it is to letting go ways of working that get in the way of delivering great products.
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