The uncomfortable part was that nothing had got worse. Same people, same codebase, better tooling than a year earlier, and a cycle time that had quietly doubled. We had added eight engineers to a team of six and assumed the slowdown was onboarding. It was not. It was that every change now needed four or five people to agree, and four or five people agreeing takes a day and a half in a team that has no boundaries in it. This is the method we used to cut it, written as seven steps you can run in about three weeks.
Before step one: the trap this method is built to avoid
Most reorganisations start with a diagram. Someone draws three boxes, puts names in them, announces it on a Thursday, and by the following Thursday the boxes have the same cross-dependencies as before, plus the resentment of whoever got moved. The reason is that a diagram records who reports where, and the thing slowing you down is who has to agree. Those are different structures, and only one of them appears on the chart.
So this method never asks you to draw boxes. It asks you to count agreements, group people so that fewer agreements are needed, and then write down which agreements remain. The chart is the output, not the input.
Step 1: Measure the coordination cost before you redraw anything
Open your last 30 merged pull requests. For each one, count the number of distinct people whose review, approval or verbal sign-off was genuinely required before it could ship. Not the number of comments. The number of people who could have blocked it. Write the median down.
In our case the median was 4, with a tail at 7. A median of 4 means that the default path for a change involved assembling four humans across different working hours, which in a team spread between Dubai hours and an offshore pod is not a meeting, it is a day. Six months earlier, at six people, the median had been 2.
Take two more numbers while you are in there. First, the share of changes that touched a service nobody owned, which in our case was 60 per cent and explained most of the tail. Second, the median hours from approval to merge, which tells you whether the delay is getting agreement or getting attention.
These three numbers are the before picture. Capture them now, because in four weeks everyone will have an opinion about whether the split worked and nobody will have evidence. If you are also still deciding how many people the team should have at all, settle that first with the sequencing in our headcount planning method: splitting a team and resizing it in the same month makes both unmeasurable.
Pair counts are arithmetic, not a measurement of your team. The point is the slope: adding people to one pool costs more than it returns well before it feels like it should.
Step 2: Draw squads around what a customer notices
Here is the decision that determines whether any of the rest works. Group people by the outcome they own, not by the technology they happen to work in.
The layer-shaped split is tempting because it is easy to staff and easy to explain. Frontend here, backend there, mobile in the corner. It also means that every change a customer can see crosses at least two boundaries, which is the exact cost you set out to remove. You will have replaced informal coordination with formal handoffs and called it structure.
Run this test instead. Take the last five things you shipped that users actually noticed. For each, ask how many squads it would have touched under the shape you are proposing. If the answer is more than one for most of them, the shape is wrong. Reshape and run the test again.
A practical constraint for this market: if a meaningful part of your product is a regulated flow, payments, identity, anything with a compliance review attached, that flow usually wants to be a squad rather than a feature inside one. The review cadence is different from the rest of the product and it drags everything adjacent onto its clock.
Step 3: Size each squad against the on-call rota, not the backlog
Teams size squads by how much work they can see. Then the rota collapses in month two and the reorganisation gets blamed for something that was decided in the spreadsheet.
If a squad owns anything in production, work it out from the duty, not the backlog:
- Four is the floor. Four people can hold a weekly rotation, absorb one person on annual leave, and survive one resignation while hiring. Three cannot: the moment one of them is away it is a two-person rota, which in practice is one person who never fully disconnects.
- Eight is the ceiling. Above eight, the daily standup turns into a status meeting that nobody needs, decisions get made in side conversations, and the squad begins splitting informally without anyone deciding who owns what.
- Five or six is the comfortable middle for a squad that owns a customer-visible area plus its own on-call.
A squad that does not own production, an internal tooling group for instance, can run at two or three. Say so explicitly, because otherwise someone will add it to the rota by default. If you are building the rotation itself for the first time, our note on hiring a site reliability engineer covers the duty design that goes with it.
A squad is not a group of people who work on similar things. It is the smallest group that can take a change from idea to production, and be woken up about it, without asking permission.
Step 4: Write the boundary down as decisions, not as a diagram
One page per squad. Three lists, in this order:
- Decides alone. Everything this squad can change, deploy and roll back without consulting anyone. Be generous here. A short list in this section is how you end up with the same median sign-off count as before.
- Needs one named squad to agree. Changes to a shared contract, a schema another squad reads, a published interface. Name the squad, not the person, so the dependency survives someone leaving.
- Needs an architecture decision. The short list of changes that go to a cross-squad forum: new datastore, new language in production, anything that changes how services authenticate to each other.
Then do the part everyone skips: read the three pages side by side and find the orphans. In our case, two services appeared in nobody’s first list and in everybody’s second. That is exactly the 60 per cent from step one, made visible. An orphan service with no owner is not a gap in the document, it is the thing that was slowing you down, and it has to be assigned to a squad before you announce anything, even if the fit is imperfect.
Try it yourself: stress-test the shape before you announce it
Send us your proposed squad boundaries and the roles you have open. We will tell you which squad is under the size floor, which dependency has no protocol, and which hire actually unblocks the split. Platform engineers | Enterprise software development in the UAE
Get 3 Free Developer ProposalsStep 5: Decide what the platform squad owns before you staff it
The platform squad is where these reorganisations go wrong quietly. It gets defined as “the people who look after infrastructure”, which is not a definition, it is a job queue. Within a month it is absorbing everything the product squads do not want, its roadmap is other people’s tickets, and the two strongest engineers in it start taking calls from recruiters.
Define it by two lists instead:
- What it publishes. The interfaces, pipelines and defaults other squads consume without asking. A deployment path, an environment, an authentication library, a paved road for a new service.
- What other squads may no longer touch. The smaller list, and the one that gives the squad actual authority rather than a service desk.
Two rules we hold to. The platform squad has customers who can refuse its product, meaning a product squad can decline to adopt a paved road and say why, and that refusal is information rather than insubordination. And it does not carry the on-call for other squads’ services. The second rule is the one most frequently broken in the first quarter, usually with the best intentions, and it converts a platform squad into an operations team within two months. For the ownership question underneath all of this, our note on hiring an engineering manager covers who should hold these boundaries once there are more than two squads.
Step 6: Give every dependency a protocol
After step 4 you have a list of remaining dependencies. Each one needs a mode, chosen deliberately, with the choice written next to it:
- Collaborate, with an end date. Two squads work closely for a defined period, typically while a boundary is still being discovered. The end date is not optional. Open-ended collaboration between two squads is just one large squad that has not noticed.
- Consume an interface. One squad uses what the other publishes, with no conversation required. This is the target state for most pairs, and the only one that scales with headcount.
- Embed to transfer. One squad places a person inside another for a few weeks to transfer a capability, then leaves. Use it when the dependency is knowledge rather than code.
Any dependency without a named mode defaults to the worst one: a message in a channel that waits for whoever is awake. In a team split across time zones that default costs a day per exchange, and it is where most of the benefit of the split silently leaks away. Write the mode down even when it feels obvious.
Section 4 is what turns an org exercise into a hiring plan. Fill it last, after the boundaries are settled.
Step 7: Rewire the rituals and the hiring plan to the new shape
Two things change on the day the split lands. Rituals move down, and the requisition list gets re-cut.
On rituals: planning, review and retrospective go to the squad. Keep exactly one cross-squad forum, weekly, for the architecture decisions from list three and nothing else. The failure mode is keeping all the old meetings and adding squad ones on top, which is how a team ends up with fewer dependencies and less time.
On hiring, section 4 of each boundary card is now your requisition list, and it will not match the one you wrote before the split. The pattern is consistent enough to predict:
| Squad shape | The role it is almost always missing | Why the old plan missed it |
|---|---|---|
| Customer-facing product squad, 5 to 6 people | A senior engineer who can own a release end to end, not another mid-level contributor. | In one pool, seniority was shared. Split three ways, each squad needs its own, and you now need three where you had one. |
| Platform squad, 4 people | Someone with production operations depth, usually the hardest of the three to hire in this market. | Platform work was previously everyone’s side job, so it never appeared as a role. |
| Regulated flow squad, 4 to 5 people | An engineer who has shipped under a compliance review before and can read a requirement without a translator. | Compliance used to be a cross-cutting review step, not a squad with a backlog. |
| Any squad below the floor of 4 | Nothing. Merge it. A three-person squad with production ownership is a rota waiting to break. | Optimism about headcount arriving later. |
The last row is the one to defend in a planning meeting. It is always tempting to stand up a fourth squad on three people because the fourth hire is “in the pipeline”. Candidates slip, notice periods in this market commonly run to one or two months, and the squad spends that quarter on a two-person rota. Merge it and split later. To compare the loaded cost of the three shapes above before committing, our team cost calculator covers each.
What changed, and what did not
Four weeks after the split, the median sign-off count on merged pull requests went from 4 to 2 and the share of changes touching an unowned service went from 60 per cent to under 10 per cent, because the orphans from step 4 had owners. Cycle time followed, though not as fast as the sign-off count, which is worth expecting: the agreement cost falls immediately and the habits take another month.
Two things did not improve. Cross-squad work got harder, deliberately, and for the first three weeks that felt like a regression to everyone involved in it. And the platform squad was understaffed from day one, which we knew from section 4 of its own card and could not fix quickly. If we ran it again, the one change would be to open the platform requisition a month before the split rather than the week after.
FAQ: splitting an engineering team into squads
At what team size does splitting into squads actually help?
Size is the wrong trigger. The useful trigger is the number of people who must agree before a change ships, measured on your own recent pull requests. We have seen an eighteen-person team run well as one unit because ownership was already narrow, and a nine-person team grind because every change touched a shared service nobody owned. That said, the arithmetic of coordination is unforgiving: fourteen people have ninety-one possible pairs, while three squads of five, five and four have twenty-six internal pairs plus three squad-to-squad interfaces. If your median change needs four or more sign-offs, a split will help. If it needs two, a split will cost you more than it returns.
Why not organise squads by frontend, backend and mobile?
Because it guarantees that every change a customer can see crosses at least two boundaries. A layer-shaped split optimises for technical similarity, which is comfortable to manage and produces a queue at each handoff. The test we use is to take the last five things you shipped that users noticed and ask how many squads each would have touched under the proposed shape. If the answer is more than one for most of them, the shape is wrong, however tidy the organisation chart looks.
How do squads work when half the team is in another time zone?
Put the time zone boundary inside a squad only if that squad can make a decision without waiting. In practice this means a squad split across Dubai and a location five or more hours away needs its own decision-maker in each location, which usually means it is really two squads with a shared interface rather than one squad. The arrangement that fails most often is one where the Dubai half owns the roadmap and the remote half owns implementation, because every clarification costs a day and the coordination cost you were trying to cut reappears as waiting time.
What should we do about job titles and contracts when we reorganise?
Check the employment contract before the announcement, not after. A UAE employment contract names a job title, and a reorganisation that changes someone from a platform role to a product role, or that adds on-call duty to a position that did not carry it, is worth reviewing with whoever handles your contracts before it is communicated. The practical sequence we use is to settle squad boundaries first, identify which individuals end up with a materially different scope, handle those conversations individually and privately, and announce the structure only once those are done.
Start with one squad, not three
Tell us your current team size and the median sign-off count from step one. We will come back with a shape, the squad most likely to break first, and the hire that makes the split hold. DevOps engineers | Engineering managers
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Method notes: the pair counts are plain arithmetic, n(n-1)/2, and describe possible communication paths rather than a measurement of any team. The sign-off medians, the 60 per cent unowned-service figure and the four-week results come from our own engagements and are reported as our experience, not as a benchmark. The size floor of four and ceiling of eight are our operating rules derived from rota coverage, not an industry standard. Anything touching an employment contract should be checked against your own contracts with whoever handles them before it is announced.