#11 How to build great engineering organizations

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.

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

#11 How to build great engineering organizations

Show Notes