Many of us agree that adopting serverless in an enterprise has challenges. These challenges increase when the enterprise has no serverless expertise within itself. We know that serverless requires a new mindset and a different way of approaching application development. When business pressure mounts to deliver solutions faster, organisations often fall into the trap of quickly building a team by pulling engineers from different sources in order to satisfy the business goals. What such quick-fix solutions fail to achieve is the basic growth of the serverless knowledge and skills of its employees. Thus, the serverless adoption challenges left unattended. For a company that credits its own growth on the growth of its people, these quick-fix approaches are not going to offer much help. For a long term gain and to develop a growth culture within the organisation, it is important to recognise the uplift of its serverless expertise. This is where organically growing a serverless team becomes beneficial. In this talk, taking inspiration from the nature, I will take you through few important phases of growing a serverless team, and discuss how it can bring near term as well as long term benefits to an organisation. Let’s all grow and not build a serverless team!

1. How to Grow a
Serverless Team
Sheen Brisals
The LEGO Group
sheenbrisals

2. ▪ Serverless & LEGO
▪ Serverless Struggles
▪ Steps to Grow
▪ Growth Benefits
Growth Agenda

3. Serverless

4. cloud computing
execution model
pay for compute
usage & storage
auto-scalable &
highly available
no server
management
What?

5. an ecosystem of
managed services
granular level
optimisation
ideal for iterative
development
brings engineering
diversity
Why?

8. LEGO.com was
switched to
Serverless
July 10, 2019

9. Serverless Struggles

10. Early adoption
Endless experimentation
start simple iterate, evolve
follow proven patterns
solution first;
perfection next
continuous
improvement
judgmental
can’t take risk
vendor lock-in fear
invest in expansive
processes
wait for a perfect
moment

11. To Endless Experiments
Pressure
• Internal stakeholders
• External competition
Status
• Maintaining the image
• Legacy tech stack
Customer
• Modern demands
• Loosing loyalty

12. Hire
Assemble
Build
Dissolve

13. Hire
Assemble
Build
Dissolve
No
People
Growth

14. No
People
Growth
No
Team
Growth
No
Org
Growth
No Serverless Growth

15. Serverless Start
“No one starts perfect with Serverless,
but strive to be better at every iteration,
and that is important.”

16. Let’s Grow!

17. 1
The Field
Team Environment

18. Team Environment
organisation
innovative
experimentation
trust
motivation
ownership
responsible
risk taking
self belief
self-govern
fast action

19. 2
The Seed
Pilot Engineer(s)

20. Pilot Engineer(s)
Attitude
Aptitude architecture
security
programming
passion for tech
hunger to learn
‘can do’

21. 3
The Grower
Team Enabler

22. Team Enabler
coach
mentor
Role techie
passionate
Characteristics
architect committed
engineer
business
friendly
leader agile

23. Serverless Enabler
“Serverless adoption is a multi-destination
journey. Start with a good navigator for a
confident ride.”

24. 4
The Nutrients
The Training

25. certifications
workshops
conferences
lunch &
learn
courses
The Training
podcasts
newsletters
meetups
hackathons
open
source
community
blogs

26. 5
The Growth
The Growth

27. The Growth best
practices
DevOps
collaboration
serverless
skills
infra
CI/CD
cohesive pairing

28. Serverless Mind
Serverless requires a "mind-shift" to see the
products as event-driven orchestration of
managed services, knitted with infrastructure
code, to bring the best value

29. 6
The Fruits
The Victories

30. The Victories
Team Outcome
PoC
MVP
Service in PROD
Trust
Confidence
Respect
Stakeholder Opinion

31. 7
The Maturity
The Awesome Team

32. The Awesome Team
ownership
culture
community
contributions
engineers as
architects
releases
features
velocity
awesome team
DevOps
practices

33. Serverless Engineer
“A software engineer who is innovative,
efficient, capable of building secure, cloud
first and cost effective functional solutions
iteratively using managed services.”

34. 8
The Pruning
Trim Distractions

35. Trim Distractions
Distractions
conflicts of
interest
communication
hurdles
over-engineering
practices
re-invention
mindset
no customer
benefit
no business
value
wandering
tech thoughts
process
overload
low
productivity
complacency always awesome

36. 9
The Renewal
The Retrospective

37. The Retrospective
tech debt
reduction
technology
uptake
service
refactoring
process
changes
team
adjustments
bonding
activities
training &
workshops
team
hackathon
experts
sessions

38. 10
The Offspring
New Teams

39. New Teams
awesome team
amazing team
A team
super team

40. Environment
Engineers
Leader
Training
Growth
Outcome
Team

41. Benefits

42. Agile, iterative, and automated serverless
development is like a gravity defying take-off.
Once launched, no stopping!
Serverless Journey

43. Business Value Growth
Value Acceleration

44. • Parallel development streams
• MVP first, sophistication next
Fast features
• Automated deployment pipeline
• Multiple daily releases
Rapid releases
• Confidence in the technology
• Trust in the teams
Business
harmony

45. People Growth
Team Acceleration

46. Serverless requires a new way of thinking, new way of
working, and new way of running applications. Meaning,
we need to change our way of thinking, our way of
working, and our way of running applications.
Serverless Thinking

47. full-stack
profile
community
aware
customer
care
organisational
asset
• architecture
• DevOps
• write, talk
• open source
• code camps
• ownership
• on-call
• monitoring
• sharing
• high morale
• efficiency
• value
Accelerated team growth

48. Technology Growth
Serverless Acceleration

49. helps to grow high
calibre serverless
competency
helps to keep the tech
stack fresh and
efficient
saves from expensive
and complex legacy
migration cycles
aids to build a secure,
resilient and scalable
ecosystem

50. If serverless can be the slingshot to give us the
acceleration to win battles and bring value, then
we must accept, adopt and of course, accelerate
to enjoy the true potential of being serverless!
To close…

51. Go
Grow
Serverless Teams
@sheenbrisals
Thank
You
sbrisals.medium.com