I’ve been managing Developer Infrastructure teams (alternatively known as Developer Acceleration, Developer Productivity, and other such names) for almost a decade now. Developer Infrastructure (which we usually shorten to “Dev Infra”) covers a lot of ground, especially at a company like Shopify that’s invested heavily in the area, from developer environments and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) to frameworks, libraries, and various productivity tools. When I started managing multiple teams I realized I’d benefit from creating a mental model of how they all fit together. There are a number of advantages to doing this exercise, both for myself and for all team members, manager and individual contributor alike. First, a model helps clarify the links and dependencies between the various teams and domains. This in turn allows a more holistic approach to designing systems that mitigates siloed thinking that affects both our users and our developers. Seeing these links also lets us identify where there are gaps in our solutions and rough transitions. Second, it helps everyone feel more connected to a larger vision, which is important for engagement. Many people feel more motivated if they can see how their work fits into the big picture. There’s no single perfect model. Indeed, it’s helpful to have different models to highlight different relationships. Team structures also change and that can require rethinking connections. I’m going to discuss one way that I thought about my area last year, reflecting the org structure at that time. In fact, constructing this model actually helped me think through other ways of organizing teams and led to us implementing a new structure. Before we get into the model, though, here’s a very brief description of the teams that reported into me last year: Local Environments: The team responsible for the tooling that helps get new and existing projects set up on a local machine (that is, a MacBook Pro). This includes cloning repositories, installing dependencies, and running backing services, amongst various other
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