The way work flows through your teams—especially when it comes to dependencies—plays a important role in determining whether product-focused teams or specialist teams will work better for your organization. Two categories of dependencies are particularly important: sequential and reciprocal.
Sequential Dependencies
A sequential dependency happens when one team finishes their work and hands it off to another team without needing much further coordination. Once the work is passed along, the receiving team can continue with minimal interaction with the original team.
In theory…
For example, a specialist-team might manage the database, while another team handles the user interface. As long as the database is stable and doesn’t need frequent updates, both teams can operate independently, which theoretically works well.
But in reality…
In practice, what often happens is that handoffs become frequent, or the work becomes too intertwined with the needs of the product. As a result, specialist teams can become bottlenecks, slowing down progress.
Reciprocal Dependencies
Reciprocal dependencies are more complex because teams need to collaborate continuously throughout the development process. In this scenario, product-teams—cross-functional teams with all the skills needed to deliver a complete product feature—tend to be more effective.
Balancing Product Teams and Specialist Teams in Your Agile Framework
When designing your own Agile framework, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to find the right balance based on how work flows through your system, particularly focusing on the type and frequency of dependencies. Both product teams and specialist teams serve different purposes, but your framework should prioritize eliminating the most common dependencies first.
- Product teams: These are ideal for handling reciprocal, high-frequency dependencies, where teams need to collaborate continuously to deliver a complete product feature. By merging skills into product teams and giving them ownership of entire features, you minimize external dependencies and allow them to work autonomously. This helps them move faster and avoid getting blocked by other teams. The more frequent the reciprocal dependencies are, the more you should merge teams into product teams to handle these dependencies internally.
- Specialist teams: These teams are better suited for sequential, low-frequency dependencies, where one team completes their work and hands it off to another team with little need for ongoing coordination. Specialist teams focus on stable, specialized components, like operating systems or transaction processing services, where expertise is critical but changes are infrequent. They provide deep technical knowledge but may slow down overall agility if involved in frequent handoffs.
Designing to Eliminate the Most Common Dependencies
To optimize your framework, the focus should be on eliminating what you have most of—start by merging teams into product teams for the highest frequency reciprocal dependencies. This reduces coordination costs and speeds up delivery by allowing product teams to manage complex, interrelated work without external blockers.
Once the high-frequency reciprocal dependencies are addressed, you can leave the low-frequency, stable work with specialist teams that don’t require constant coordination with other teams.
Summary
In designing your Agile framework:
- Prioritize product teams for reciprocal, high-frequency dependencies, merging teams to minimize external coordination and boost autonomy.
- Use specialist teams for sequential, low-frequency dependencies, where deep expertise is needed but changes are rare.
- Focus on eliminating the most common dependencies first to improve efficiency and reduce bottlenecks.
By structuring teams based on the nature and frequency of dependencies, you can create a framework that is flexible, efficient, and tailored to your organization’s unique needs.
Learn more
See also the Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) CAO design guidelines: Define Your Product and Contain Reciprocal Dependencies.