Zwei Seiten einer Medaille: Produkt und Organisation richtig schneiden

Fokusthema Webinar held on October 5, 2026 (German language)

Every cut through a team is also a cut through the product. Peter Beck starts in 2003 at Web.de, where he spent his days running between a frontend team at one end of an old factory hall and a backend team at the other. Without knowing it, he was running against Conway’s law: an organization builds products that mirror its own communication structure.

The math explains why organizations must slice at all. Communication paths grow quadratically with the number of people, and structure in Teams and Arenas cuts that effort dramatically. Where to slice is answered by the product. Peter shows how to find component boundaries through interfaces and aspects, from the smartphone to a companion robot, and how evolution stages tell you which parts to keep close to the Teams and which to standardize. He then maps Team forms against evolution: long-living Teams, crews, and task forces, each with the methods that fit, from Design Thinking through Scrum and Kanban to statistical process control.

The discussion with the participants and Andreas Schliep turns to the practical limits: stable interfaces are rare, old structures outlive reorganizations, and real change needs people with leverage. The closing message: slice the product, not the production.

Based on the chapters Slicing the Product and Slicing the Organization from the book Outevolve by Peter Beck and Andreas Schliep.