Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams
At the company I work at, we're definitely not autonomous. If as a team we have a goal, as a dev, I don't know what it is. We have roadmapped (read: itineraried) work items, basically handed to our team to produce. Devs are resources who are paid for by budget that was earned by committing to said roadmap items delivery.<p>So what does it look like? Well, as devs, we have specific feature requirements handed to us with little-to-no prior input, we're always behind schedule so we're never afforded the time and space to do things right, it's always "we'll fix it later". We occassionally have some kind of "our competitor is doing this, we have to do this" piece of work that comes in and shifts all of our roadmap items later of course. No one ever stops to ask whether we're having the impact we anticipated, or whether it's even worth keeping the work.<p>Combine this with a replatforming-through-new-work effort on the go, you've got a slow mutation from the old platform into an even uglier new platform that doesn't get the right effort applied to it.<p>But hey, we're "agile", we have mission teams, we have two-pizza teams, we're goal oriented. I mean, we say these things, but in reality it's planned out work, with deadlines, delivered by multiple generic teams named after areas of the customer journey that end up being the center of philosophical debate about whether this bit of work lives with _this team_ or _that team_.<p>Although I don't think the team size or the number of them is necessarily the problem, the article rings true in my experiences - but it's down to culture of the organisation, more than the topology.