January 21, 2025

Multi-Mobbing with Extreme Ownership: Should Ensemble Decisions Wait for Outside Approval?

19 minutes

In this thought-provoking episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we dive into the world of extreme ownership within a multi-mobbing environment. What happens when a mob/team wants to make a decision, like extracting a method, refactoring to a new pattern, or reorganizing code boundaries? Should that decision wait for approval from outside teams? Or does extreme ownership mean trusting the mob to act autonomously for maximum flow efficiency?

Topics Discussed:

Autonomy vs. Consensus: Should mobs prioritize quick decision-making or seek input from external teams?

Multi-Mob Context: Exploring the dynamics of multiple mobs interacting and how to handle shared ownership of repositories and projects.

Inverse Conway Maneuver: Can designing your organization’s team structures to match the architecture you want your systems to have prevent this problem?

Lean Thinking and Efficiency: How waiting for approvals from external owners can create lean wastes.

Boundary Flexibility: Should code and team boundaries be rigid or adaptable to changing circumstances?

The Monolith vs. Microservices Debate: Is the real issue a technical architecture debate or is the root problem found elsewhere?

Scenarios and Examples:

A hypothetical comparison of shared ownership in MS Word vs. MS Excel.

The impact of Joe Justice’s Law on decision-making and team interactions.

The challenge of managing too many communication nodes in multi-team environments.

Key Questions Discussed:

Is it more valuable to reduce the number of teams interacting with a repo?

Should boundaries of ownership evolve with time?

How can we balance flow efficiency with healthy collaboration across teams?

How does "Nothing in Tech Matters Except XP" impact this discussion?

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Don’t miss this insightful episode as we unravel these questions and more! Discover how the principles of extreme ownership and mob programming can transform team dynamics and decision-making processes in software development.

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Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/rAT-EurLnrI

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By The Mob Mentality Show

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