What does the team need to effectively own and operate services already in production, regardless of new development work on those services? The team has codified the creation of new services to their agreed standards. Compliance controls are managed and verifiable through change control. Quality of service is monitored, reviewed and managed proactively. The team is accountable for the full ownership of their services and has autonomy within boundaries to reach strategic outcomes.

Aligned Accountability 🔗

Enable teams to take shared responsibility for delivering outcomes, not just outputs, while being trusted to decide how they deliver within clear strategic and organisational boundaries. Aligned accountability means that the team owns the problem, understands its impact on the customer or business, and collaborates to find the best way forward. This includes making architecture, process and delivery decisions together within agreed organisational standards, while continuously learning and improving as a team.

💎 Benefit: Teams with aligned accountability move with greater confidence, purpose and autonomy towards the strategic goals. They are more invested in the outcomes they deliver and more capable of adapting when plans change. This alignment strengthens ownership, reduces handoffs and creates the conditions necessary for a generative, high-performance culture to emerge.

📶 Signal(s):

  • The team owns the problem and defines how to solve it.
  • Outcomes are shared across engineering, product and design.
  • Alignment cascades from the strategic goals and agreed standards.
  • Decisions are made collaboratively within these clear boundaries.
  • Delivery practices and responsibilities are team-owned.
  • The team reflects, improves together and strives to learn fast from failure.

Templates & Golden Paths 🔗

A comprehensive set of helpers, templates and accelerators that expedite development and ensure consistent implementation of best practices across our common component types. Component / Project templates implement blueprints in preferred architectures, coding conventions and engineering standards. Accelerators combine templates into workflows to scaffold, build, test and deploy new services in under an hour. AI learns from past projects and existing codebases to dynamically help boot strap and accelerate development.

💎 Benefit: Automated standardisation of agreed best practices and compliance across common component types.

📶 Signal(s):

  • New components or projects can be created and deployed to production in under an hour.
  • Regular contributions to the shared templates and accelerators from Communities of Practice.
  • It is easy to transfer ownership of components or projects between teams.
  • AI is used to assist in generating, evolving templates and accelerate new component development.

Compliance as Code 🔗

My team incorporates compliance requirements as code, automating compliance checks and ensuring adherence to regulatory standards. Compliance rules and checks are codified, allowing for automated enforcement during the development and deployment process. By treating compliance as code, the team can efficiently implement and maintain compliance controls, reducing human error, enhancing auditability and minimising the time and effort required to maintain regulatory compliance.

💎 Benefit: To ensure that the team incorporates compliance requirements as code, automating compliance checks and ensuring adherence to regulatory standards.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Audit-related requests for information are straightforward and largely self-serve.
  • We incorporate compliance requirements as code, automating checks for adherence to compliance & standards.

Incident Management 🔗

The incident management process on my product is robust and well-structured, enabling swift response and minimising the impact of incidents. The team follows established incident response procedures, including incident identification, communication, prioritisation and resolution. Clear roles and responsibilities are defined, ensuring effective coordination and collaboration during incident handling.

💎 Benefit: Team is competent and confident to respond to inevitable incidents.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Incidents are raised and resolved regularly and without panic.
  • Incidents are lead by a variety of individuals.
  • Interesting incidents are investigated and knowledge is shared with leadership and other teams.

APIs & SDKs 🔗

The team provides well-designed APIs and software development kits (SDKs) that facilitate integration and extensibility. The APIs offer clear documentation, well-defined contracts and consistent interfaces, enabling seamless interaction with the product's services and functionalities. The SDKs provide comprehensive tooling, libraries and code examples, simplifying the development process for external and internal consumers. Internal publishers support fake or mock implementations of their APIs to help consuming teams automate testing.

💎 Benefit: To ensure that the team provides well-designed APIs and software development kits (SDKs) that facilitate integration and extensibility.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Well-designed APIs and SDKs support integration and extensibility.
  • APIs have clear documentation, contracts and interfaces.
  • SDKs include tooling, libraries, code examples and support for mock implementations.

Eventing 🔗

The ability to coordinate functionality across distributed systems and services using events. Common conventions to publish system and user events for analytics and observability.

💎 Benefit: Customer solutions and analytics can be implemented as composable, extendable and highly decoupled implementations. Increased team decoupling and independence.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Standard patterns, SDKs and tooling to publish, store, subscribe and consume events.
  • Schema validation is in place to block foreign or malformed events.

Service Metrics 🔗

Maintaining a clear view of service health from the user's perspective. Key user journies and actions are defined and measured. Service level objectives (SLOs) service level indicators (SLIs) are reviewed at regular intervals. These SLOs and SLIs define synthetic tests of primary workflows and key metrics, such as response time, availability and error rates.

💎 Benefit: The team can monitor the product's performance against established benchmarks or expectations of stakeholders and users.

📶 Signal(s):

  • The team is aware of a baseline level of performance for their key services over the past 3-6 months.
  • Noisy errors and alerts are actively managed and reduced.

Static Analysis 🔗

The team integrates static analysis tools that effectively identify code issues, potential vulnerabilities, and maintain code quality standards. These tools automatically analyse code, check for common programming errors and enforce coding conventions. Tools run locally and as part of automated builds to detect and resolve new issues as early as possible. Data on software composition & supply chain is available centrally to manage licensing and security vulnerability risk.

💎 Benefit: Proactively detect and resolve code issues, potential vulnerabilities and enforce coding conventions.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Tools run locally and as part of automated builds to detect and resolve new issues as early as possible.
  • Detected issues are triaged by team members regularly.
  • Security and Quality representatives curate filters and criteria.