In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into how to structure and scale engineering organisations effectively. Drawing on years of consulting experience, they cover autonomous teams, domain-driven ownership, reducing cross-team handovers, internal platform teams, Conway's Law, the dangers of gatekeeping in ops and security, why self-service tooling is non-negotiable, and what it looks like when organisations are run like a portfolio of internal startups. A practical guide for engineering leaders and anyone building out an eng org.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:43 When does an organisation become the bottleneck?

3:39 Starting with the problem space: divide and conquer

6:22 Autonomous teams and moving away from top-down command

8:03 How to detect misalignment: count the handovers

9:15 Conway's Law: use it intentionally

12:27 Single ownership and full accountability per domain

14:32 Internal service teams: when to spin one up

17:09 Each department as its own startup

19:57 Hero syndrome and knowing what not to build in-house

25:13 Self-service tooling: make it so good they choose it

28:33 KPIs, review cadences and cost visibility

36:24 Common anti-patterns: top-down command, founders who don't let go

41:42 Internal tooling teams as natural monopolies

45:26 The operations and security gatekeeper trap

48:20 Shifting from gatekeeper to enabler

53:02 Why developers must own production

57:34 How to set cross-divisional standards

1:07:09 Good internal platforms embed standards in golden paths

1:14:29 Entrepreneurial mindset within organisations

1:18:45 Summary and closing thoughts

Technologies Mentioned

AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks

Apache Airflow - https://airflow.apache.org

Terraform - https://www.terraform.io

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io