| name | Design Team Structure |
| description | Help design engineering team structures that align with product architecture and organizational goals. Use when planning a reorg, adding headcount, seeing coordination problems, or evaluating current structure. |
Frameworks to Apply
Technical Coherence (Primary)
- Identify UX Domains: What are the bounded contexts of user experience?
- Identify Shared Domains: What capabilities support multiple UX domains?
- Map to Three Layers:
- Product Engineering (features within UX domains)
- Domain Engineering (shared capabilities)
- Infrastructure Engineering (commodity tools)
Trunk and Branches (for Infrastructure)
- Trunk: Core shared platform (small, stable)
- Branches: Specialized teams (reliability, security, productivity)
Team Sizing
- 5-8 engineers per team (with exceptions)
- One manager per team
- Tech lead optional but common at senior teams
Discovery Questions
About the Product
- What are users actually doing in your product?
- What capabilities are shared across multiple areas?
- Where do users experience friction from inconsistency?
- What's your competitive advantage?
About the Current State
- How are teams organized today?
- Where are the coordination problems?
- What's duplicated across teams?
- Where are the bottlenecks?
About Constraints
- What's your current headcount?
- What's your hiring capacity?
- What can't change (for political/practical reasons)?
- What's the timeline for changes?
About Goals
- What does success look like?
- What problems are you trying to solve?
- What would make engineers more productive?
- What would improve quality/velocity?
Process
- Map the product to UX domains and shared capabilities
- Assess current state against the three-layer model
- Identify gaps between structure and architecture
- Design target state aligned with product
- Plan transition with minimal disruption
- Define success metrics to evaluate the change
Common Pitfalls
- Organizing around technology instead of user experience
- Creating platform teams without clear customers
- Over-investing in infrastructure, under-investing in domain
- Copying another company's structure without adapting
- Changing too much at once
Templates
Reference: templates/org-design-canvas.md
Output
Help them articulate:
- Product architecture (UX domains, shared capabilities)
- Current state assessment
- Target state design
- Gap analysis
- Transition plan
- Success criteria
