Why full stack teams are not the answer

It may seem handy to have a full stack team that can do it all, but beware of being too prescriptive early on.

Developers are liable to carry titles like backend engineer, senior data engineer, or staff infrastructure engineer as important elements of their identity. 

As managers, it can be easy to fall into the trap of treating people like interchangeable pieces on an org chart. A common staffing exercise is to put together full stack product teams consisting of back- and front-end engineers, product management and a designer. In later years we have expanded our view on building engineering teams to use terms from the popular Team Topologies framework, such as stream-aligned teams and platform teams.

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