How to co-ordinate separate product teams without lumbering everybody with excess process and meetings?

Question

About a year ago we started on the journey of slowly breaking apart our legacy E-commerce platform and replacing it with smaller rewritten services. We now have several teams each focusing on separate areas of the website e.g. Checkout, Cart, Search etc etc

Each of these teams looks after a number of services that deliver the functionality they are responsible for. The challenge we are facing is how to keep these teams co-ordinated, following the same practices, respecting the high level architecture requirements, maintaining API's that are suitably similar (e.g. using the same terminology for concepts such as the cart/basket) without dumping a load of meetings and process on to them? One of the big benefits of our current setup is that developers feel empowered and we don't want to remove that entirely!

Answer 1

In order to facilitate the mutual understanding of the different teams, you may consider domain driven design. It brings the following benefits:

• use of a same terminology across the teams ("ubiquitous language")
• use of bounded contexts for delimiting independent sub-domains deserved by different teams (e.g. sales and accounting)
• use of a context map, to clarify the relationship between bounded contexts and related terms used by different teams.

Domain driven design also defines principles to design a good API. However, design principles are not sufficient. You also need some cooperation between the teams in order to identify the respective needs and requirements, so to define the most appropriate API. One way to handle this is to have an integration team (one representative of each team to make the link between the global integration team and the sub-teams). This is best organized to the scrum of scrums principle.

Beyond integration issues, the scrum of scrum approach is also suited to scale scrum beyond a small team. As such it is also a good option to keep the releases and the sprints in sync across the sub-teams.