In any organization, large or small, a defined strategy and tireless accountability are essential to making sure all teams are aligned and focused as they go about their day-to-day work. For a company operating in a scaled agile environment, where teams are empowered to make decisions, strategic context must be crystal clear to create a trusting environment where teams can do their best work and drive business results.

By 2022, the skills employees will need to thrive will include creativity, trustworthiness, emotional intelligence, and leadership, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2018. Intelligence matters. But recently, business leaders have begun to place more emphasis on “soft skills” – you know, those intangible qualities that make the difference between being a dear or dreary coworker.

It’s been a few years since the “Spotify Model” became the latest trend for structuring an engineering team. But, like its predecessors, the model based on tribes and squads has some pitfalls. How to structure an engineering team is a question that’s been covered at length, from the strengths and weaknesses of common team structures to a matrix of organization based on risk and scale to why you should choose your own model.

If you’ve ever created products that can be deployed in different types of environments, you know that it can be challenging to migrate between one and the other since the core architecture often needs to be very different. We learned this the hard way back in 2018 on Confluence, when a large number of customers trying to migrate from server to cloud were having problems. It was a challenging, prone-to-failure process that required a lot of attention and preparation from site admins.

Maybe your company just merged with another organization. Or perhaps you were a member of a group that was just bought out. Chances are you’ve been there: more than 75 percent of industries have become more concentrated since the late 1990s and the mergers and acquisitions boom is only expected to grow.