One of the hardest challenges in technical leadership is figuring out how to handle "maintenance mode" without burning out your team.
When demand for a live service declines, how do you keep the lights on without draining your delivery team's capacity for new features?
Traditional approaches, like dumping old code onto an isolated Ops team or forcing product teams to do background maintenance, simply don't work. They bottleneck capacity, reduce reliability, and absolutely kill developer job satisfaction.
Instead, high-performing organisations are adopting Multi-Service Teams.
By creating a dedicated team responsible for maintaining all low-demand services within a specific product vertical, you achieve a few critical things:
- Protected Capacity: Your primary delivery teams are completely freed up to focus on new, high-value propositions.
- Better Reliability: The multi-service team retains the necessary domain knowledge and operational incentives to protect service levels.
- Reduced Cognitive Load: Because they are only dealing with a single product domain, the team isn't overwhelmed by context switching.
To make this work, leaders must establish strong guardrails. You need a strict definition of what "low demand" actually means (e.g., three months of live traffic with slowing deployment frequency), clear criteria for transferring services between teams, and a team name that reflects their mission and outcomes.
Stepping back to design team structures, mentor junior engineers, and manage systemic capacity requires a massive mindset shift.
Watch Steve Smith's video and his discussion on a radical new way to long term software ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eQhkBKeB
Being a great senior developer doesn't automatically make you a great technical leader. Your job is no longer to do all the complex technical work yourself, but to coordinate team performance, remove obstacles, and build systems that enable your engineers to be successful.
If you are stepping into a leadership role or want to refine how you manage your teams, Dave Farley has put together a free guide: How to Lead a Technical Team.
You can download the free guide and level up your leadership skills here: https://lnkd.in/e6PMQmWW
#SoftwareEngineering #TechLeadership #DevOps #EngineeringManagement #ContinuousDelivery #TeamDynamics
