DevOps is a team sport, yet many organizations still structure their IT workforces as separate pools of specialists — developers on one side, operations on the other. Bridging that gap requires more than tooling: it demands deliberate team design, shared ownership, and an environment that makes collaboration inevitable rather than incidental.
Why Team Structure Is the Foundation of DevOps Success
A report titled Full-Stack Teams, Not Engineers, published by IT Revolution and led by Jason Cox, Director of Platform and SRE at Disney, argues that DevOps “is not an organizational structure; rather, it defines a way to organize independent teams, a culture, a set of Lean principles, and a set of practices.” The report emerged from IT Revolution’s fifth annual DevOps Enterprise Forum held in Portland, Oregon.
The core thesis: the idea of the full-stack engineer is “more myth than reality.” Rather than recruiting a unicorn who can design, build, deploy, and operate software across the entire stack, organizations should instead build full-stack teams — diverse groups whose combined skills cover every phase of the software delivery lifecycle.
“Instead of hunting and waiting on the perfect full-stack engineer, a more sustainable paradigm would be for organizations to create full-stack teams. This balanced team is filled with people possessing a core set of skills plus different specialties.”
Jason Cox et al., Full-Stack Teams, Not Engineers — IT Revolution
What a Full-Stack Team Actually Looks Like
Cox and his co-authors provide two practical models for composing a full-stack team:
Model 1: Skill-Diverse Product Team
In this model, a team is assembled around a specific deliverable. The report gives the example of an internal customer health dashboard team composed of two back-end engineers, a front-end engineer, a data scientist, a data analyst, a designer, and a product manager. Each member is essential, but rotation between roles and cross-teaching within the team are strongly encouraged. Members also participate in communities of practice across teams to build and share deeper expertise.
Model 2: Embedded Functional Experts
In the second model, functional specialists are embedded directly into product teams. Team members carry two reporting relationships: a primary one to the product team leader, and a secondary one to their functional area manager, who is responsible for skill development and career progression. Embedded team members take ownership of both delivery and operational reliability while also ensuring the wider team gains literacy in their specialty.
4 Ways to Energize Your DevOps Teams
Beyond team composition, culture and physical environment play a significant role in DevOps effectiveness. A second IT Revolution report introduces the concept of the Dojo — from the Japanese for “place of the way” — as a transformation immersion center for DevOps teams. The concept is outlined by Ross Clanton, Executive Director of Technology Modernization at Verizon, and his co-authors.
Target’s CIO Mike McNamara describes how the Dojo model worked in practice at their organization:
“The Dojo is an immersive, six-week session where teams execute their normal work with Agile coaches on site to support them and provide anything they need from a DevOps point of view. The Dojo has been fantastic in getting teams engaged with Agile and DevOps, removing the natural resistance and fear of change, and then supporting the team through the changes while maintaining productivity. It’s been a huge success for Target.”
Mike McNamara, CIO — Target
Clanton and his co-authors outline four concrete steps to establish a Dojo that energizes DevOps initiatives:
1. Create a Space for Learning and Fun
Place the Dojo in a high-traffic area of the office. Visibility broadens exposure to what teams are experiencing, creates curiosity across the organization, and drives future demand for Dojo services. The physical space should feel open, inspiring, and welcoming — not another grey conference room.
2. Arrange Team Tables That Optimize Collaboration
Seating layout matters. Options include individual desks grouped together with dual monitors at each station, or a “family-style” table with no monitors to enable free-flowing conversation. The governing principle: everyone should sit in close proximity so that in-person collaboration becomes the path of least resistance. Whiteboards are essential for visualizing ideas and maintaining shared situational awareness.
3. Design Open Spaces That Enable Inter-Team Collaboration
Silos dissolve when teams can learn from each other organically. Some of this happens naturally — teams overhear adjacent conversations that happen to be relevant to their own problems. But open spaces also create intentional networking opportunities, allowing teams to identify where they can support each other and surface shared problems earlier.
4. Set Up a Communication and Collaboration Hub
Clanton and his co-authors recommend creating a “demo lounge” — a dedicated area equipped with a projector or large display surface, comfortable and informal seating, sound amplification, and video conferencing capability to connect with other Dojos or remote teams. The demo lounge gives all Dojo teams a venue to share their work, and gives stakeholders — management, business partners — a natural entry point to observe progress without disrupting the team’s flow.
Mastery Takes Time — Teams Make It Possible
As Cox and his co-authors note in the Full-Stack Teams report, “it takes years of hard work to become a master of anything, and DevOps skills are no different.” No single engineer can realistically own the entire DevOps landscape. The organizations that consistently deliver software at speed and scale are those that invest in assembling, developing, and sustaining diverse teams — and in creating the environments that let those teams do their best work.
Whether through the embedded-expert model, the skill-diverse product team, or an immersive Dojo programme, the underlying principle is the same: DevOps culture lives in teams, not individuals. Getting that structure right is the prerequisite for everything else.
Source: Originally reported by ZDNet. Reports referenced: Full-Stack Teams, Not Engineers and the Dojo report, both from IT Revolution’s DevOps Enterprise Forum series.