Inspired by Spotify in 2014, Movio CTO Kalman Bekesi introduced the concept of squadification to Movio’s development team in 2015. Armed with a bunch of keen, independent developers, Kalman set out to streamline the processes and improve the output of Movio’s ever-expanding products. Since implementation, Movio’s squads have doubled and are more efficient than ever, so we caught up with Kalman to find out how the concept has evolved over the past two years, and what successes - and challenges - the squads have encountered along the way.

Looking back to 2015, what made you decide to give squadification a try?

Kalman Bekesi: There were two key purposes when we decided to incorporate squadification into the technology side of Movio. The first was to attract the right kind of applicant for the engineering roles we have here. We strongly encourage contribution of fresh ideas, so wanted to provide the space and resources to empower our engineers to truly innovate and build incredible technology without too many restrictions. We had seen Spotify’s success with their implementation of squads and noticed they were looking to attract the same sorts of software engineers that we were, which made us curious to explore the concept ourselves.

Secondly, we needed to adapt a new process that would enable our company to scale. Movio was - and is - growing rapidly, and the introduction of squads would allow us to streamline processes and maintain a much more efficient work model. In order to manage growth, we needed to figure out a way to keep things running smoothly, as well as continually evolving. Squadification seemed to be a great solution.

How is squadification different to a traditional team structure?

One way of structuring a development team would be to have one person at the top - say, a CTO - making the decision of which specific technology the whole team would use. In order to make that decision, that person would need to get buy-in from all developers and then implement that one idea across the entire organization.

Squadification drops that decision-making down to a local level. The members of each particular squad only need to consider one another when making those choices, rather than the company as a whole. This worked well for us, as our engineers all bring their own smarts and love contributing to the outcome. It didn’t make sense to have a one-size-fits-all approach to the way we do things.

Those traditional development teams also tend to group back-end developers, front-end developers, operational support and database administrators separately, and products have to go through each team in order to be completed. Squads create a more vertical, end-to-end process, in which they all operate like a miniature business. Within each squad, we have a back-end developer, a front-end developer, etc. which allows the squads to work quickly and independently.

Movio has seen tremendous growth since 2015. How have the Movio engineers coped with that expansion, and how did the squads help?

As the squads have broken up to focus on various projects, it’s prevented the overall company growth from having too much of an impact on the squads themselves. We started off with four, and now have eight squads handling different aspects of our products. That expansion has happened consciously as the company has grown, in order to prevent that impact.

We have our two main products at Movio, but we like to look at each squad as its own business with its own product within that ‘greater product’. As those ‘greater products’ grow in size, we split squads up to maintain that strong focus on specific elements.

What positives have you seen?

The main thing is the communication. The communication and the relationships between team members is getting increasingly better as they continue to achieve things together.

Enabling squads to make their own technical decisions about the tools and processes they use has also proven to be very successful and appreciated by our engineers. A big part of my job is simply getting out of the way of our very talented engineers and making sure the rest of the business gives them the space they need. This allowed one of our teams to change their programming language from Scala to Go, which was a massive success and we’re now rolling it out across the business.

What challenges have you encountered?

We hit a few speed bumps at the start, such as how to manage shared resources. For example, most of our squads require data science to be a part of their projects. Figuring out whether each squad needed its own data scientist or if it would be more beneficial to have a stand-alone data science team that is shared across each. At this stage, a lot of our resources are shared i.e. data science, marketing, and design.

Another thing is, despite squadification encouraging our developers to communicate better within each squad, we’ve noticed communication between squads is a lot trickier and needs to be actively managed. Even encouraging the squads to share their successes with one another is a challenge.

Do you have future plans for any more squads?

We’re actually in the beginning stages of creating two squads that work remotely in Europe, one for Movio Media and one for Movio Cinema. One of our top engineers has been based there remotely for a few years already, and another has just moved back, which was really the tipping point for deciding to build there. We’ve known for a long time that there are a lot of really talented engineers in that area of the world, and relocating to New Zealand may not be realistic for many of them. It makes sense for us to build a presence there, around our two engineers, that’s attractive to those individuals who are unable to join Auckland HQ.

Do you have any final words or tips for development teams looking to implement squads?

It’s a really positive change. When I originally embarked on squadification at Movio, I was a lot more neutral and unsure of what way it could all go. My main tip is to get buy-in from the executive side of the business, and ensure they fully understand the impact on the company. For example, salespeople or customer support team members may have questions about parts of a product or feature and they need to know which squad is working on it in order to direct their query to the right place. At Movio, we have got Product Owners and Product Managers that help out with that sort of interaction, but it’s definitely something that you’d need to consider. It can get very confusing for the executives if they don’t understand who’s working on what.

I would also encourage anyone looking to roll out squadification to really give their engineers the ability to work as autonomously as possible. I try to give our team as much freedom around technology as I can, which leads to a lot of interesting discussions around pretty neat tech. I think this keeps everyone excited and doesn’t limit them when it comes to trying out and adopting technologies. The industry is rife with exciting new technology that can build products fast, and we want to enable our team to chase that evolution.