Simon Sablowski
Leadership & Organisational Development Consultant
Berlin, Germany
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Simon Sablowski is an independent consultant and coach based in Berlin. He helps engineering and product leaders improve organisational effectiveness by addressing challenges in team structures, cross-team collaboration, decision-making and stakeholder alignment.
With over two decades of experience in software and product development, including engineering leadership and interim CTO roles, he has worked in coaching, training and organisational development since 2015. His clients include Siemens, SAP, Volkswagen, Bayer and the European Central Bank.
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Team Boundaries Are Architectural Decisions: Making Coordination Cost Visible
Team boundaries determine where coordination is needed, who depends on whom, and how easily work can flow through an organisation. Yet many organisations still operate with team structures designed for problems they faced years ago. AI-assisted development may accelerate work within teams, but it can also expose the limitations of the structures connecting them.
Team boundaries and software architecture shape one another. Organising teams around technical components, business capabilities or shared specialist functions creates different dependencies, with different consequences for delivery. When these boundaries no longer fit the work, the resulting delays and friction are often mistaken for problems with individual performance or collaboration, even though their causes are structural.
Drawing on experience with organisations including Siemens, where around 40 teams across four countries collaborate on a single complex software product, this session introduces a practical method for making coordination cost visible. Participants learn to identify technical, approval and knowledge dependencies, estimate their coordination cost based on interaction frequency and risk, and explore how organisational and architectural decisions influence that cost.
A worked example demonstrates how redesigning teams around customer outcomes can eliminate some dependencies while reducing the coordination required for others. Participants then apply the method to their own context, mapping dependencies around a team and identifying opportunities to eliminate, formalise or loosen them.
The goal is not to eliminate collaboration between teams, but to make deliberate choices about where collaboration is valuable and where organisational and architectural boundaries create unnecessary overhead.
Key takeaways
- Understand how team boundaries and software architecture shape one another, creating dependencies that influence delivery performance.
- Learn a practical method for mapping technical, approval and knowledge dependencies between teams.
- Estimate coordination cost using interaction frequency and risk, and compare alternative organisational designs.
- Identify which dependencies to eliminate, formalise or loosen through organisational and architectural changes.
- Recognise why faster development within teams, including through AI-assisted delivery, can make cross-team coordination an increasingly important constraint.
Tags
Organisational design, Software architecture, Team boundaries, Dependencies, Coordination
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