以下是一篇詳盡的管理學文章，特別是對現在大熱的科網企業。
Twitter 不算世界第一，但其不斷創新的企業精神，絕對值得借鑒。
“One of the most scalable organizations in human history was the Roman army. Its defining unit: The squad — eight guys. The number of guys that could fit in a tent.” This is Twitter Engineering SVP Chris Fry on history’s greatest example of successful hyper-growth, and the tactic that made it possible: stable team building.
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When you’re small, everyone sits in one room and everything works. As you grow, things start to break. “That’s when you need to take all your engineering knowledge and apply it to your team, and you want to end up with a modular system where teams become the unit of scale,” Fry says. Getting bigger doesn’t have to mean getting slower.
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With a PhD in cognitive science, Fry specializes in thinking through how pieces of any given system can interact for ultimate efficiency. When it comes to building a deeply efficient engineering organization, there are several things you can do to move the needle:
Build strong teams first. Assign them problems later.
Keep teams together.
Go modular. Remove dependencies.
Establish a short, regular ship cycle.
·先建好隊伍，再分派任務
·保持團隊成員在一起工作
·模式化的工作，而不依賴個人
·建立短而規律的出貨周期
What Stable Teams Look Like
Fry is big on the importance of stability. In tech’s culture of growth and failing fast, it’s a quality that is too often sacrificed for the sake of speed. But stability isn’t just about consistency — it’s about resilience, distributed knowledge, optimal performance.
When Fry landed at Twitter, he immediately highlighted a fundamental scale issue: It’s very hard to predict events around the world. Something like the Super Bowl can spike tweets per second by millions. Last year, the company saw a massive increase out of the blue, only to realize that a popular movie had aired in Japan, urging everyone to tweet at the same time. When this is the case, it’s nearly impossible to prepare. But, increasingly, Twitter has survived even the most unexpected events — a change Fry attributes to organizational changes as it grew.
When most tech companies are just starting out — and Twitter is no exception — everyone does a little bit of everything, and almost all actions are reactive. Projects pop up, and you have to quickly rally a team around them so that things don’t fall apart. This gets you into the habit of staffing projects fast for short periods of time. This is fine at first, but it’s a habit that eventually needs to be broken.
At a certain size, two things become clear:
1) Many people are working on too many teams at once and get stretched too thin, and
2) as the leader assigning people to teams, you’ve become a huge bottleneck of information. You start accruing technical debt because there’s no time to slow down and fix all the little cracks in your products. At the same time, you lose your ability to innovate.
在公司達到一定規模以後，會出現兩件事：1）會有太多人在同一時間為不止一個團隊工作，導致戰線拉得太長；2）作為分配人員的領導，你已經成為了信息的瓶
頸，待處理的事物越來越多，沒有時間讓你慢下來去一一解決一些小問題，同時，你發現自己已沒有能力再去考慮創新這件事了。
“The only way to survive this transition is to create stable teams,” says Fry. “In the U.S., we have this cult of the individual, but I encourage leaders to think about the value of strong units.”
“When people work well together, their output is unimaginably better.”
“As a manager, your focus should really be creating these high-performing squads of people who have good chemistry, who can get things done. Then you figure out how to apply them to problems.”
“要解決這兩個問題，唯一的方法是創建一個穩定的團隊。在美國，我們強調個體的表現，但我覺得優秀的小團隊更有價值。”
“當人們協同合作時，會創造出超乎想像的共同輸出。”
“作為一個管理者，你的重點應該首先在於創建出有良好化學反應的、能把事情做好的團隊。然後再考慮分配什麼任務給他們。”
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The High-Performance Zone
“Imagine you need to solve a really hard problem, but every month you’re thrown into a room with a bunch of people you don’t really know, and you have to work together on this thing,” Fry says. “You would do a much better job if you knew how these people worked, if you had worked with them before, if you knew their strengths and capabilities and trusted them.”
This is one of the key reasons to keep teams together. Trust is a much bigger deal than most people think in this context. But trust breeds healthy communication, and that’s ultimately what boosts you into that high-performance zone where teams tackle problems with all cylinders firing.
“If you can get to this point, you will have reached Nirvana as a leader,” says Fry. “You’ll be able to hand off problems as they come, and your teams will come back with solutions devised and executed on their own.”
“You want teams that not only work well together, but that learn from each other.”
“好的團隊，不僅可以很好地協同工作，還能彼此互相學習。”
To achieve this level of flow, Fry recommends keeping teams together for at least six months, and ideally a year or more. This might be impossible at a brand new startup, but once you’ve gotten to 40 engineers, it becomes critically important that people work with others who optimize and extend their capabilities. Then, once you have this formula, you don’t want to mess with it.
A big part of building long-lasting teams is protecting your people. Too often, Fry says he sees startups failing to treat their employees as well as their hardware. “Would you run your data center at 100% utilization all the time? No. Not even 80 or 90%. But some companies expect this level of performance from their people.” This is a one-way street to burnout and attrition, and the losses that come with them.
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Making someone responsible: Anoint a great, communicative leader who will be responsible for the output of any given team. Maybe it’s the engineering manager, maybe it’s someone else. But you have to have a point person who is encouraging everyone else to perform and communicating progress to the broader organization.
Clarifying mission: Every member of every team should be able to tell you immediately what their group’s goals are and why they are important. It’s the only way to fuel momentum.
Knowing your role: If teams at your company are performing well, your only role as a top executive should be to make sure they have all the resources they need to deliver on their mission. “This is often the hardest thing you face as a leader, but it’s also the most important,” Fry says. A lot of startup founders have a hard time letting go of the details, but to get the most out of your teams, you often have to accept a supporting role.
Establishing and respecting the sanctity of teams gives you several advantages. They become self-healing and self-correcting organisms. When a stable team encounters a glitch or misses a goal, it regroups, knows how to run a tight post-mortem and adjusts for the future. At the same time, you give people a chance to distribute important information.
“You see it all the time where one person leaves a team and takes all this institutional knowledge with them,” says Fry.
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Think Modular
“Modularity is the key to scale.”
When strong teams (instead of individuals) become the basic unit in your organization, you can build faster, distribute authority, and still do astonishingly original things, says Fry.
The first rule of thumb: Good modules are cross-functional. Fry saw this as Twitter developed its mobile strategy from its earliest days. At first, the mobile team was a small band of engineers formed simply to get the work done as fast as possible. It was split into two factions, the Android developers and the iOS developers, and every feature the company wanted to build flowed through them like a funnel.
The problem was that building high-quality features required a lot of external support: Great design, thoughtful product management, strategic marketing — not just talented engineering. With the initial system, scaling fast while maintaining this high bar would have been impossible.
To fix the problem, the first thing Fry’s team did was train its own legion of engineers how to be great at mobile across platforms. Twitter even purchased a company that specialized in mobile training to bring this expertise in-house.
“Training people so that they aren’t hyper-specialized is one of the best ways to prevent bottlenecking,” says Fry. “That way, you never have to wait on an answer from that one guy who knows how to do Android. You can do so much more on your own.”
Once the company had this highly-skilled mobile force, it distributed these engineers among feature-based teams, each comprised of a product specialist, a designer, and others needed to make that feature a success. This gave each engineer control over their own work and made them a central pillar of a strong team at the same time. As a result, Twitter was able to continually ship a number of high-quality mobile features. And because the engineers knew each other — and were able to keep lines of communication open across teams — features that made it to launch were more cohesive.
This modular structure naturally eliminates dependencies. When people have broader skill sets, they don’t have to depend on other people’s knowledge. And when designers and product managers have instant access to an engineer focused solely on their product, they don’t have to continually ask the one monolithic mobile engineering team how things are going.
在 Twitter 早期發展無線戰略時，整個無線團隊都是工程師，他們簡單的分成兩個部門，一些人負責 Android 的開發，另一些人負責 iOS。可每當公司想增加個什麼功能，項目到了這兩個部門手裡，進展就會變得像老牛拉破車一樣緩慢。 這個問題在於，要增加一個新的功能，除了有工程師可以干活，還需要大量外部支持的配合：良好的設計，完善的產品管理以及合適的營銷戰略。
要解決這個問題，Fry 首先要做的就是把自己的工程師訓練成跨平台的無線專家。為此 Twitter 甚至收購了一家公司，用於這項培訓。這樣一來，再也沒有所謂的專家，人人都可以解決多方面的問題。
公司有了這些技術熟練的工程師之後，再把他們分配到各個小組去，每個小組有一個產品專家、一個設計師以及實現具體功能的工程師。每個工程師有對自己工作的控制權，同時他們也是該小組的核心支柱。因此，Twitter 能夠不斷推出一批批高品質的無線新功能。而且由於工程師相互認識，他們之間的互相通信能保證團隊的開放性，使公司更有凝聚力。
這種模式化結構消除了對特定人的依賴。工程師有了更廣泛的技能，也不必再依賴於其他人的知識。而設計師和產品經理有了自己接口的工程師可以咨詢，也不必一直追著整個工程師團隊來詢問項目的進展了。這樣，團隊的每個人都明白自己項目的進展，這增強了團隊成員對工作的控制感。
Quick to Ship
When Fry first joined Salesforce, the company was more focused on testing product than shipping it. To shake things up, his first order of business was to restructure the engineering organization — at that time about 40 strong — into small, nimble teams. He also added more milestones and shortened testing phases. Eventually, the company was able to release data-driven products every four months while also growing to over 600 engineers.
He arrived at Twitter two years ago, eager to jump back into rapid growth. “That’s where the fun and the challenge is,” he says. “When you’re on a rapid growth curve, you’re challenged every day by problems you’ve never faced before.” Again, he was charged with scaling technology and human capital at the same time. “To do this, I really had to think about what I wanted to hold constant and what I would need to change to help the team grow.”
Soon, he instilled the same quick-ship mentality that worked at Salesforce by establishing a short but regular cycle of delivery....
以小團隊為基本單元的組織架構的優勢就顯現出來了，這使得產品出貨周期可以得到保證。每個人都可以井井有條地工作著，deadline 也可以被保證了，團隊的開發進程不會因為個人原因而耽擱。
“Twitter 無線產品出貨周期的縮短，要歸功於優秀小團隊的建立”Fry 總結道。
Source:
Read more: http://firstround.com/article/Twitter-Engineering-SVP-Chris-Fry-on-the-Power-of-Stable-Teams#ixzz2sygJTBEn
http://www.36kr.com/p/209561.html
Unlocking the Power of Stable Teams with Twitter’s SVP of Engineering
Twitter的Chris Fry教你如何構建一個穩定而高效的工程團隊
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