Overview
Team of Teams is the approach to Product Development at scale that Barry Hawkins has evolved since the mid 2000s. It has a deliberate bias towards lightweight, minimalist structure, with sufficient flexibility to be applied in a range of organizational settings.
The full name for this concept is Hawkins Team of Teams to differentiate it from other concepts that use the term “team of teams.” One notable example is General Stanley McChrystal’s book “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World”, published in 2015. Barry Hawkins began calling his system Team of Teams in 2012 after constant pressure from clients and colleagues to give a name to the system of delivery he had evolved.
Outcomes
Scaling your product development approach is a journey with numerous incremental milestones, and many changes are in progress at any given time. For team members as well as yourself, it is important to keep in mind the outcomes you are pursuing, as they are the answer to both “Why are we doing this?” and the means to evaluate “Is this doing what we thought it was going to do for us?” Read More…
Composition
One of an organization’s first questions when getting started with Team of Teams is “Which teams should we group together?” The key considerations are Size, Domain Affinity, Stakeholder Overlap, and Team Interdependence. Read More…
Roles
Just as we have cross-functional team members at the team level, so is the leadership of a Team of Teams meant to be cross-functional, with each discipline present in the teams has a discipline leader representing that craft. Read More…
Artifacts
Team of Teams has a core set of artifacts that are used in its recurring cycle of events. These are the Portfolio Backlog and the Portfolio Roadmap. Read More…
Events
Team of Teams operates primarily via a cycle of recurring events at the biweekly, monthly, and quarterly levels. These events are the Biweekly Sync, the Monthly Stakeholder Review, and the Quarterly Review. Read More…
Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC)
Team of Teams is designed with the intent of integrating with a variety of Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) approaches. Read More…