QCon New York 2019 - Inside Job: How to Build Great Teams Within a Legacy Organization?
QCon New York 2019 - Inside Job: How to Build Great Teams Within a Legacy Organization?
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In this talk from QCon New York 2019, Zoe Gagnon and I share our approach to building great teams within a legacy organization at Meetup.com. We cover the challenges of project-based team structures, legacy code, low engineering morale, and broken communication between product and engineering.
We walk through the initiatives that helped — smaller user stories, test-driven development, trunk-based deployment, and restructuring leadership to separate engineering management from technical leadership — as well as the organizational shift from project teams to long-term product squads. Along the way, we’re candid about what worked, what didn’t, and the importance of working within your sphere of influence and managing change through stakeholder engagement rather than top-down directives.