{"id":11371,"date":"2022-09-07T10:39:24","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T09:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=11371"},"modified":"2024-12-10T01:47:43","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T01:47:43","slug":"stop-trying-to-embed-specialists-in-every-product-team-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/stop-trying-to-embed-specialists-in-every-product-team-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop trying to embed specialists in every product team"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably heard of You Build It You Run It<\/a> before. It\u2019s an operating model that empowers product teams to own every aspect of digital service management. When done well, it accelerates your time to market, increases your service reliability, and grows a learning culture. There are also some pitfalls, which can drain the confidence of your senior leadership, and ultimately put the success of You Build It You Run It at risk.<\/p>\n

In our recent You Build It You Run It playbook<\/a>, my co-author Steve Smith and I take a deeper look at the embedded specialists pitfall. You can guard against this pitfall, and even escape it if necessary.<\/p>\n

Teams of specialists suffer at scale<\/h2>\n

Steve and I often see organisations with small, central teams of specialists supporting a number of delivery teams. For example, you might have some delivery teams and an application support team dependent upon a small DBA team, for the provisioning of your on-premise relational databases and management of your user data.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

You don\u2019t want developers to manage database backups themselves, nor to debug a live database with millions of rows of user data. At the same time, your DBAs can\u2019t transfer their depth of expertise to developers. This means DBA workload will inevitably increase as you add more delivery teams, no matter how skilled your DBAs are. Conflicting prioritisation calls, strained relationships, and a lack of delivery team progress are likely, as well as burnout for your DBAs.<\/p>\n

Steve and I have seen specialists in this situation too many times, in different organisations and in different specialisations. We\u2019ve seen it with DBAs, InfoSec analysts, network admins, and operability engineers (which you might know as DevOps). In addition, the easy answer of recruiting more specialists into the central team doesn\u2019t usually work, because there\u2019s a consistent scarcity of affordable specialists in the marketplace.<\/p>\n

The embedded specialists pitfall<\/h2>\n

You Build It You Run It is an operating model in which product teams build, deploy, operate, and support their own digital services. If your organisation adopts You Build It You Run It and you have multiple product teams constrained by a struggling specialist team, one solution that could be considered is embedding those specialists into the product teams. In other words, if you had 10 product teams and one team of 10 DBAs, you would embed each DBA into one of the 10 product teams.<\/p>\n

Steve and I call this the embedded specialists pitfall<\/a>. It\u2019s the logical extreme of You Build It You Run It, and it\u2019s not a good idea. In theory, embedded specialists will act as first responders, and influence technical quality on product teams via their deep expertise. However, we\u2019ve seen serious problems emerge for embedded specialists:<\/p>\n