Scaling Olympus Through Organizational Evolution One Step at a Time
Why do we need to do something?
Given Olympus's current organizational complexity, implementing major structural changes quickly enough to impact v2.0/v3.0 is impossible without a fundamental shift in approach.
How we're operating & what works
AI-driven automation reducing manual overhead
Better understanding of cross-team relationships and bottlenecks
Maintaining high standards while improving velocity
Backstage Framework: Self-service developer portal now used by 1000+ companies including Netflix and HBO. Measures success through developer happiness and productivity metrics.
Productivity Engineering: Unified developer experience through federated platform console. Platform teams provide tools and standards, not bottlenecks.
Three Customer Success Stories: Platform-as-enabler approach with measurable productivity gains across different organizational structures.
"Developer productivity is the universal definition of how we enable our technical community to focus on their day jobs" - Platform teams as enablers, not blockers
Backstage framework adoption by 1000s of companies, focusing on developer happiness as a key productivity metric
Companies that successfully scaled moved from "platform teams build everything" to "platform teams enable others to build"
What we'll do
"Building the House"
Platform teams build everything for other teams
"Providing the Bricks"
Platform teams create tools and standards for others to build with
Key Insight: This transformation aligns with both our current success patterns at Thoughtcap and proven industry practices from Netflix, Spotify, and Microsoft.
Build reusable tools for streams and squads to develop end-to-end capabilities
Establish clear guidelines and best practices for autonomous team building
Enable the entire system to scale without platform bottlenecks
Product person leads the stream for major release increments with full accountability
Project person leads the squad for smaller increments within stream objectives
Engineering personnel report to stream/squad leader for proper authority and faster decision-making
Alignment Principle: Engineering serves product development goals, with architects and technical leadership supporting product needs. Leaders who can't adapt to enable faster delivery will be replaced with those who can.
Goal: Systematic transition from waterfall handoffs to end-to-end agile delivery
Visualize desired business outcomes and success metrics for each stream
Current and future state analysis of how value flows through the organization
Identify and visualize all cross-team dependencies to eliminate bottlenecks
Organize insights, actions, and ownership into actionable improvement plans
Implement a single, actionable step that demonstrates both organizational and process changes
Cross-team blocking dependencies eliminated
End-to-end capability effectiveness
Time from concept to production deployment
We're not just mapping current interactions—we're fundamentally shifting from waterfall handoffs to agile, end-to-end delivery. Interface contracts become self-service tools rather than negotiated dependencies.
A dedicated product lead will own guild priorities, ensuring tools and standards are driven by actual stream needs rather than theoretical requirements.
Their authority evolves to focus on enabling rather than gatekeeping. Success will be measured by how effectively they enable autonomous team delivery rather than direct control over implementation details.
Guild-provided tools, standards, and automated guardrails will prevent most issues. The occasional mistake is outweighed by dramatically faster delivery and learning cycles.
We have the vision, the industry proof points, and early success at Olympus. Time to scale it.
✅ Define the specific first pilot step
✅ Identify willing pilot team(s)
✅ Establish measurable success criteria
✅ Begin transformation process