In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into how to structure and scale engineering organisations effectively. Drawing on years of consulting experience, they cover autonomous teams, domain-driven ownership, reducing cross-team handovers, internal platform teams, Conway's Law, the dangers of gatekeeping in ops and security, why self-service tooling is non-negotiable, and what it looks like when organisations are run like a portfolio of internal startups. A practical guide for engineering leaders and anyone building out an eng org.
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Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:43 When does an organisation become the bottleneck?
3:39 Starting with the problem space: divide and conquer
6:22 Autonomous teams and moving away from top-down command
8:03 How to detect misalignment: count the handovers
9:15 Conway's Law: use it intentionally
12:27 Single ownership and full accountability per domain
14:32 Internal service teams: when to spin one up
17:09 Each department as its own startup
19:57 Hero syndrome and knowing what not to build in-house
25:13 Self-service tooling: make it so good they choose it
28:33 KPIs, review cadences and cost visibility
36:24 Common anti-patterns: top-down command, founders who don't let go
41:42 Internal tooling teams as natural monopolies
45:26 The operations and security gatekeeper trap
48:20 Shifting from gatekeeper to enabler
53:02 Why developers must own production
57:34 How to set cross-divisional standards
1:07:09 Good internal platforms embed standards in golden paths
1:14:29 Entrepreneurial mindset within organisations
1:18:45 Summary and closing thoughts
Technologies Mentioned
AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks
Apache Airflow - https://airflow.apache.org
Terraform - https://www.terraform.io
Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io
