Flocks vs Pyramids: When self-organization stops working
Most engineering organizations want autonomous teams. In smaller systems, that often works well: teams coordinate directly, feedback is fast, and local decisions stay local. Strong communication happens because the system is still understandable.
As systems grow, though, feedback loops slow down, integrations become harder to reason about, and changes become expensive to reverse. Teams that once moved independently suddenly need standards, platform constraints, and coordination just to keep things reliable. Communication starts breaking down, long before the systems do.
Using examples from platform migrations, this talk explores why organizations drift between uncontrolled autonomy and excessive governance and how both can quietly reduce delivery effectiveness.
You’ll leave with practical ways to spot early coordination signals, recognize when architecture needs to become more explicit, and start better cross-team conversations without needing to be a manager, architect, or scrum master.
This talk is aimed at engineers, tech leads, and platform teams dealing with growing coordination complexity between teams. It’s less about a specific framework (like Team Topologies) and more about recognizing the environmental conditions that change how teams collaborate as systems scale.
While it touches on themes like autonomy, governance, and architecture, the goal is to help attendees recognize early coordination and communication signals especially if they’re not in formal leadership or architecture roles.
Jos is a Technical Architect with extensive experience helping customers transition to cloud-native solutions and infrastructure. He’s also passionate about community organizing and has been part of the organizing teams for DevOpsDays Amsterdam and Eindhoven, but also KCD Amsterdam and Utrecht.
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