Creating empowered and productive autonomous teams with Compass

Autonomous teams are usually made up of cross-functional members who are independent, value-aligned, and empowered. By following a flat autonomous structure as opposed to a hierarchical one, each team member is encouraged to be a self-starter rather than a passive participant. This environment promotes an open exchange of ideas and opinions, healthy competition, and proactive collaboration and communication. Plus, decisions can be made more quickly and effectively when the framework is transparent and participatory. You don't need to consult multiple people before making a decision, and this creates a sense of ownership.

In Compass, your team's dashboard is a launchpad for everything team-related. It provides a central hub for your teams to access information and perform different functions.

Compass also brings to the stage a formalised method of communicating out cross-team dependencies, Announcements. When one service needs to communicate something, say a deprecation, planned downtime, or other event that other teams should be aware of, service owners can create announcements to alert other teams to an impending change requiring their attention. This encourages teams to be forthcoming before making changes that could lead to downtime or frustration and similarly helps make other teams feel more confident of their own work, knowing that changes will generally be captured in a proactive fashion.