7 Comments
Jul 13, 2023Liked by Aurimas Griciūnas

New subscriber, long time reader - love your work. One thing I could suggest to make your content go above and beyond, is to have a git code version of your concepts outlined. Even just a really simple overview of how some of the key concepts are brought together (e.g. an automated retraining pipeline). Obviously an entire project with the end to end integration of components etc. all built out is a pipe dream, but just some code examples of key aspects of your articles would be awesome!

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May 31, 2023Liked by Aurimas Griciūnas

I tend to agree with what you’ve outlined here Aurimas.

The benefits you’ve listed are in my mind some of the strongest indicators of successful organisations, particularly those in environments that reward rapid innovation. Collocation ultimately reduces a lot of wasted effort, which should positively impact quality and velocity.

The challenges are also big headwinds, and something that any team looking to try this approach must be fully aware of. I think they are also ultimately solvable challenges, with perhaps the toughest being that of finding a single threaded technical lead for the team. Maybe that’s not important? Having an ML lead and a technical lead that can collaborate may solve for this without the hunt for an elusive jack of all trades (this has its down sides too).

The reason I made this comment is that I have just finished a 3 week project where we collocated and the results were really quite amazing. We were able to move quickly, and the empathy you speak of missing... well by working together we learn to understand one another. Happy to keep diving into this with you as I think it’s a fascinating pattern that may yield great results.

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May 28, 2023Liked by Aurimas Griciūnas

What benefits/costs do you see to further integrating the ML capability into the one product delivery team and removing yet another team boundary? The coordination of multiple teams almost inevitably creates waste in the value cycle, but is it worth the cost of increasing the scope of a single team for? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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