Central organizations != silos. Looking forward to hearing from @rusmeshenberg about how Netflix utilizes central teams to enable #devops in “The Role of Central Teams in DevOps Organizations” at #reInvent 
How do central orgs develop at a company? It’s all tied to growth. You may have a central-central team or even local-central teams @rusmeshenberg #reInvent
Did you know Daredevil DevOps? He definitely DevOps #reinvent
Why are central teams a necessity? The SWD lifecycle involves *lots* of common elements that have nothing to do with business functionality. #reInvent
How many different pipelines, observability tools, testing frameworks, etc does a single org need? Netflix’s opinion: as few as possible! Opinion: totally agreed! #reInvent
Central teams enable leverage for teams to focus on value. Key to Netflix is that central team solutions are not mandated to be used by teams. If the central tool isn’t valuable... don’t use it! #reInvent
No mandate can pose some challenges but the incentive for central teams to build high value solutions results in great reusable products aligned to internal consumers #reInvent
Adoption of new tech is a bet. Central teams have a responsibility to balance value add with the churn it may cause for your internal consumers and the acknowledgment that if you’re too slow teams will roll their own #reInvent
Opinion: a lot of what @rusmeshenberg is covering now aligns with @thoughtworks tech radar approach of adopt, trial, assess and hold. It’s a good mental model #reInvent
Build vs Buy: Netflix prefers buying. OSS is the route if it meets 80% of their needs. Netflix only builds from scratch when there’s nothing else.
Opinion: this is big. I think Netflix has the rep of “build it all ourself” due to OSS and confs. Reality is different #reInvent
Opinion: this is big. I think Netflix has the rep of “build it all ourself” due to OSS and confs. Reality is different #reInvent
Centralized orgs can also help with internal development. Also... for central orgs to be successful you need good discoverability or fragmentation is inevitable #reInvent
Effective communication is essential for central solutions to be discoverable. Need to comm via multiple mediums: roadshows, e-mails, newsletters, coffee talks, etc. Otherwise teams won’t know solutions exist #reInvent
Specialized or generalized solutions? Definitely favor generalized built with extensibility in mind! This will provide the opportunity to innerSource. Opinion: healthy innerSource is *hard* #reInvent
Central team product management is essential across multiple central orgs to identify opportunities and cross cutting concerns #reInvent
Engagement models with central orgs will evolve with organizational growth. Opinion: would have liked to go into detail about what type of interaction models Netflix uses. Central teams run risks of evolving into the dreaded “ticket shops” #reInvent
Beware: finding balance between tooling migration is critical. Constant change in central tools can result in burnout for those teams as they’re constantly supporting numerous teams. #reInvent
Netflix has central platform, data, and security teams. There needs to be close collaboration between these groups as each changes. If each group pushes minor changes without alignment the broader org will run the risk of “thousand paper cuts” #reInvent
Talking about types of fragmentation: accidental and deliberate. If it’s the former there’s a comm issue. If it’s the latter there’s a gap in offerings. Reducing fragmentation via proactive work with customers works much better than “preventing” fragmentation #reInvent.
Celebrate adoption! Central orgs have customers like any company. If you’re capturing internal market share rejoice in it! #reInvent
How do we measure the success of central orgs? Typical business KPIs but make sure to capture customer sentiment as well #reInvent
Interaction with central teams post-growth: try to leverage inter-personal comms as much as possible but it’s just not scalable. Netflix has moved to a documentation-heavy comm model over their earlier presentation-heavy method of interacting with their teams #reInvent
The Q&A for this session is great @rusmeshenberg ! Love the detail in response to size of central teams: should grow with org growth but sublinearly. #reInvent
What about governance and budgeting, any chargeback done? Not at Netflix since there’s only one line of business. Teams scale based on feedback of internal clients. #reInvent
This was legitimately one of the best sessions I was at this week. Definitely not a technical one but value, quality of delivery and the Q&A was fantastic. Thanks for a great talk @rusmeshenberg #reInvent
@threadreaderapp unroll please
