Unlocking value with durable teams, Anna Shipman:

If you build teams around projects, this means that there is a ramp-up period while the team go through the early stages, and if the team is not together for long enough, it’s possible they won’t spend very long (if any time at all) in the performing stage. This happens if new initiatives come in and the team is disbanded to form other, new teams.

It takes a lot of effort to form a team; you need to find the right balance of skills, someone to tech lead, delivery manage and be the product owner; you need to find engineers, customer researchers, product designers and possibly business analysts and you need to make sure that the work they are currently doing can be finished or stopped.

Specialization and matrix’d teams seem inevitable as an organization grows. I suspect that a cross-functional, self-sufficient team that has time together and knows how to work together will almost always outperform teams of specialists spread across multiple projects and priorities.

h/t Simon Willison