[OA.STD.6] Provide teams ownership of the entire value stream for their product

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Establish teams that are able to own their respective value streams and products. These teams follow a you build it, you run it approach, as coined by Werner Vogels in 2006. The team responsible for building a system should also be responsible for running, maintaining, and overall owning it. At Amazon, we call these small, autonomous teams with a single-threaded focus two-pizza teams. This approach minimizes handoffs and makes teams both the creators and custodians of their products.

Value stream ownership does not mean preventing teams from working together. These teams not only own the development of their product, but also take responsibility of aspects like security and quality assurance. To be successful in this model at scale, centralized functions, such as centralized security teams, must also evolve: instead of direct oversight, they should act as enablers, providing resources and expertise to these distributed teams.

The enabling functions should provide the necessary knowledge, resources, and attention required for teams to be successful. Individual teams build relationships with the centralized functions, share knowledge, and enhance processes consistently over time. This ultimately leads to improved outcomes for their products, customers, and the organization. Invest in ongoing cross-functional training to help individual team members acquire skills that will make them successful within their value streams. This training could include teaching developers to be security-minded, or teaching security resources to develop. Over time the teams should gradually become more self-reliant, collaboration between teams should improve, and deployment frequency should increase.

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