Organization architecture autonomy and accountability

Onfido - Confidential & Proprietary
Kevin Goldsmith 
Chief Technology Officer
Organization,
Architecture,
Autonomy and
Accountability

@KevinGoldsmith
Some principles

@KevinGoldsmith
Data beats opinion
Everyone has opinions. How do you know which
one is correct? Is it the opinion of the most senior
person? Data is how you decide. Understand your
customer, your business, the environments you
operate it. Make a decision based on reality.

@KevinGoldsmith
“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to
theorize before one has data. Insensibly one
begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead
of theories to suit facts.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal In Bohemia (1891)

@KevinGoldsmith
Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration
Optimizing for speed leads to faster learning,
including from failures. Faster learning leads to
higher quality. Optimizing for quality is an obstacle
to speed, which undermines learning and slows
down improvements to quality.

@KevinGoldsmith
Speed without data means
you aren’t learning

@KevinGoldsmith
Data without speed means
you aren’t learning fast
enough

@KevinGoldsmith
DATA
VISION
EXPERIM
ENTS
LEARNING
PRODUCT
INFORMS
GUIDES
GENERATES
DRIVES
PROVIDES

@KevinGoldsmith
Achieving Speed
of Learning
Through
Organization

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams go faster.

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams learn
faster.

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous
adjective
au·ton·o·mous - ȯ-ˈtä-nə-məs
• (of a country or region) having the freedom to govern itself or control its own
affairs.
• having the freedom to act independently.
synonyms: self-governing, independent, sovereign, free, self-ruling, self-
determining, autarchic; self-sufficient

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Fully empowered and resourced to fulfill their
mission and their commitments.

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Fully empowered and resourced to fulfill their
mission and their commitments.
UX Prod Mgr Dev Lead Back End Front End Test Mobile Data Eng

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams
Generate their own experiments.

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams NOT
Autonomous Individuals

@KevinGoldsmith
Individuals on autonomous
teams are accountable to
each other.

@KevinGoldsmith
Requirements of
Autonomy

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs communication

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs context

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs transparency

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy needs trust

@KevinGoldsmith
If you can’t trust the people
you hire, you are bad at hiring
people.

@KevinGoldsmith
By giving teams context and trust

@KevinGoldsmith
and reducing dependencies
on other teams

@KevinGoldsmith
on other teams
they can make decisions on
their own

@KevinGoldsmith
on other teams
their own
and they can execute on their
decisions

@KevinGoldsmith
on other teams
their own
They become AUTONOMOUS!
and they can execute on their
decisions

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomy Anarchy=

@KevinGoldsmith
Where are we going?

@KevinGoldsmith
• Product Vision
Where are we going?

@KevinGoldsmith
• Product Vision
• Company Goals
Where are we going?

@KevinGoldsmith
How do we get there together?

@KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs

@KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices

@KevinGoldsmith
• KPIs
• Best Practices
• Leadership

@KevinGoldsmith
Grow in market <X>
Get all documents for the market

@KevinGoldsmith
Software
Architecture for
Autonomous
Teams

@KevinGoldsmith
MICROSERVICES!!!!!
Four Blair Services Pvt. Ltd. [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

@KevinGoldsmith
“Organizations which design
systems... are constrained
to produce designs which
are copies of the
communication structures
of these organizations.”
Melvin Conway

@KevinGoldsmith
“We find strong evidence to support the
mirroring hypothesis. In all of the pairs we
examine, the product developed by the
loosely-coupled organization is
significantly more modular than the
product from the tightly-coupled
organization.”
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the
“Mirroring” Hypothesis MacCormack, Baldwin, Rusnak - Harvard Business School, 2008

@KevinGoldsmith
How Microservices Enable Autonomy
delivery schedules
teams coordination on architecture
Decouple

@KevinGoldsmith
How Microservices Enable Accountability
Ownership of deliverables
Fast delivery of value
Ability to experiment
Operational Responsibility
Support

@KevinGoldsmith
Composable platforms require
a lot of tooling to work.

@KevinGoldsmith
The Role of
Devops

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous Teams Require
Devops Support

@KevinGoldsmith
Devops
Supports teams so they can be autonomous.
Provides the tools they use to build and deliver
quickly
Create the path of least resistance for teams to
follow the best practices

@KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated

@KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated
Make the best practices the path of least
resistance, but don’t prevent other choices.
Let the new ideas in.

@KevinGoldsmith
Being Opinionated
When the new becomes the commonplace, make
it a new path of least resistance.

Organization,
Architecture,
Autonomy and
Accountability

@KevinGoldsmith
Data > Opinion

@KevinGoldsmith
Speed of iteration >
Quality of iteration

@KevinGoldsmith
Autonomous teams can
iterate faster

@KevinGoldsmith
For teams to be autonomous,
they need context, direction
and guardrails

@KevinGoldsmith
For autonomous teams to be
accountable, they need
mutually agreed upon KPIs to
measure their performance.

@KevinGoldsmith
Microservice architectures
support autonomous teams,
by reducing dependencies

@KevinGoldsmith
Devops teams support
autonomy by making it easy to
follow best practices without
preventing innovation.

@KevinGoldsmith
!‫רבה‬ ‫תודה‬

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