How to do it…

Re-organizing a team is never a simple task, and there are many non-obvious factors to consider. Factors such as personality, individual strengths and weaknesses, and past histories are outside the scope of this recipe, but they should be considered carefully when making any changes. The steps in this recipe provide one possible way to move a team from being organized around a monolithic code base to being optimized for microservices, but there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for every organization.

Use the following steps as a guide if you think they apply, but otherwise use them for inspiration and to encourage thought and discussion:

1. Working with other stakeholders in your organization, build out a product roadmap. You may have limited information about the challenges your organization will face in the short term, but do the best you can. It's perfectly natural to be very detailed for short-term items on a roadmap and very general for the longer term.
2. Using the product roadmap, try to identify technical capabilities that will be required to help you deliver value to your users. For example, you may be planning to work on a feature that relies heavily on search. You may also have a number of features that rely on content uploading and management. This means that search and uploading are two technical capabilities you know you will need to invest in.
3. As you see patterns emerge, try to identify the main functional areas of your application, paying attention to how much work you anticipate will go into each area. Assign higher priorities to the functional areas you anticipate will need a lot of investment in the short to medium term.
4. Create new teams, ideally consisting of four to six engineers, who are responsible for one of the functional areas within your application. Start with the functional areas that you anticipate will require the most work over the next quarter or so. These teams can be focused on the backend services or they can be cross-functional teams that include the mobile and web engineers. The benefit of having cross-functional teams is that the team can then deliver the entire vertical component of the application autonomously. The combination of service engineers with engineers consuming their services will also enable more information sharing, and hopefully, empathy.