A-Team
Leaders of our engineering initiatives and a single, approachable point of contact to engineering.
Not this A-Team. Our Infobip Architect team.
As we were growing rapidly, we realized 2 gaps:
Our system was super big, and nobody had the oversight;
All the teams or divisions were scoped to their problems and had their own road-maps. If a new company-wide challenge occurred and we needed a PoC to try to solve the challenge, all the key players were already utilized.
On the flip side, we had several folks with a strong technical background, good understanding of their domain, hands-on experience and who understood the organization. So, the next step was quite obvious: To merge these exceptional players into one team.
Their goals? Simple:
Steering the wheel with the crucial initiatives;
Driving research areas upon new initiatives and technologies;
Helping leadership in making timely business decisions based on proper data and metrics;
Creating an overall vision of platform architecture;
Identification and analysis of bottlenecks, as well as proposing how to overcome them, etc.
They were still dedicated to some specifics (telco, databases, networking, infrastructure...), but now they were talking much more. And they could steer our company architecture and point out the risks on the company level.
As they have their domain of expertise, and they work closely with the teams as a "safety net" if teams want to verify their solutions or are stuck with some challenge. As A-team members have vast experience, they can suggest what worked, and what didn't. Of course, sometimes the solutions aren't obvious, and in that case, an A-team member is assigned for months to an initiative, if the initiative is of that importance, ofc.
What if a team doesn't agree with the A-team's suggestion? Each team is the owner of their system, so they can go with their solution. But we expect arguments to win discussion, not egos.
By working with teams, A-team members are also coaching and helping other colleagues grow, maybe even to someday join the A-team, who knows.
Well, apart from being the leaders of the Engineering initiatives, they also serve as a single, approachable point of contact to engineering. There is a Slack channel owned by A-Team that we in engineering use on an everyday basis. We use it to ask questions, start discussions, propose initiatives, etc. One of the main tasks of A-Team is being technical consultants to the rest of Engineering, but also mentoring senior engineers to further scale knowledge.
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