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The road to success in R & D efficiency of 1000 person Internet companies

2022-07-07 12:16:00 【InfoQ】

This is a 「 R & D effectiveness team size 、 Function division and analysis of advantages and disadvantages 」 The fourth in the series . Last article 「 The size of R & D effectiveness team of small and medium-sized Internet companies 、 Function division and analysis of advantages and disadvantages 」 Mainly analyze the production and research team in 200 The current situation of small and medium-sized companies and give some suggestions . This article mainly analyzes the production and research team in 1000 The current situation of R & D efficiency of second and third tier medium-sized Internet companies with human scale , Combined with my own personal experience , In the organizational structure 、 operating duty 、 Advantages and disadvantages 、 And how to get results , Gave some suggestions .

The company size

Production research team 1000 Left and right

Team size ：10-30 Left and right

Organizational structure

The production research team starts from 200 Man to 1000 Man is a great leap , Domain segmentation 、 Functional segmentation 、 Management functions will also be launched . To elaborate on these differences ：

Management rank ： Management ranks begin to appear . Before, the company was flat , I hate it CEO Here are the employees . But people come to 1000 It will be graded when . The boss can't manage so many people , Need hierarchical management . The suggestion on the Internet is that the middle and senior managers generally manage alone 5—8 people , It is best to 7; Grassroots managers manage alone 10—15 personal , It is best to 12.

Domain segmentation ：200 Human company , Maybe the product R & D, testing, operation and maintenance are all undertaken by one , however 1000 This rarely happens in human companies . First of all, it is difficult for a person to specialize in so many fields ; Secondly, those who are proficient must have a high price , Unless the partner of the company 200 It's hard for a human company to leave such a big cow ; No matter how capable the last person is, his energy is limited . Big companies will also put such a person in a high position , Stand in a higher position to improve team effectiveness , Good management , then
Let professional people do professional things
. This is what I emphasize
Specialization 、 Work together
Reasons for the idea .

One more word is , In foreign enterprises, many people may be promoted to a high level through technology, but they don't bring anyone , But in China, this kind of situation is very, very rare . For example, there are several bosses with the most advanced technology in Kwai , All of them have a management rank .

Professional team ：200 A human team may have only one designer , The reporting relationship can be simpler , however 1000 The size of people sometimes 10 A designer , At this time, we need to set up a separate UI/UE The team , Even the design center ; Previously scattered in various teams PMO It will also be gathered into a team ; Find someone to write before SQL Just issue the report of , Now, a separate big data team is usually established , Data analysis team ,AI Team, etc , stay 200 When you are a person, someone will do something similar , But it rarely exists as a professional team . Many things , Once on the scale, it will be very different , Including product architecture 、 Realization way 、 Performance index requirements, etc .

The R & D efficiency team is a professional team subdivided in the field of R & D infrastructure construction . An optional organizational structure is shown in the figure below .

Organizational structure ：CTO- R & D effectiveness department

PMO Team responsibilities ： Promote the implementation of strategic projects , Support R & D project management and delivery , Ensure effective implementation ; Build a project management system , Improve the process system ; Promote cross departmental collaboration ; Identify potential risks and drive problem resolution

Platform products ： Product planning , Formulate product development strategy , And push the landing ; Responsible for competitive product research , Industry Research , Understand cutting-edge technologies and product development ideas , And be able to formulate a development path with competitive advantages ; Understand the demand scenario , Abstract formulation of platform requirements

Platform R & D ： Be responsible for the pre research of platform products 、 framework 、 Research and development ; Responsible for platform architecture design and in-depth optimization ; Keep up with the forefront of the industry , Provide technical solutions for growing business needs .

Platform operation ： Be responsible for the overall operation management of platform products , Formulate product operation plan according to the characteristics of platform products and market conditions 、 strategic 、 Layout and implement ; Responsible for product positioning 、 Media publicity 、 Market promotion 、 Formulation and implementation of overall strategies and plans for channel construction and customer service ; Organize product operation data analysis and market situation analysis , Guide the formulation and implementation of operation strategies according to the analysis results ;

This organization chart and 15 On May 8th, the same city TEG The situation is similar , At that time, the production and research team of the whole company was 1000 Left and right ,

Support enterprise level cross product 、 The comprehensive ability of cross project is concentrated in one department , Improve talent and professional density , Cooperate with each other to put ideas 、 Strategy 、 Practice is injected into products on the platform ,

It has created a practice platform to support general R & D capabilities iWork, That is, the one-stop R & D management platform in the same city , The main capabilities of the R & D effectiveness team have been concentrated on this , Fully functional , Experience the same , Get through the whole process , One stop solution to most problems in production and research , Effectively improve the efficiency of production and research . The production and research partners who have been in May 8th must know this platform .

Didi R & D effectiveness team is very different from this organizational structure .17 At the beginning of the year, Didi's production and research team has 4000+ 了 , It is quite different from the main reference scale of production and research in this paper . Didi's R & D efficiency started early 、 High starting point , Be more professional and detailed . Didi R & D efficiency team is EP Under Department ,EP In addition to R & D efficiency , There are also larger enterprise informatization businesses . In actual operation, the platform products 、 Platform R & D and platform operation are vertically divided into feature teams （Feature Team） Responsible for products one by one . I think this is a very good way , I will have a special article to introduce FT How it works . Someone asked QA Where is the little buddy ？ In fact, I have always had a point of view ： Responsible for daily delivery of actual business QA The team becomes a team alone , It is difficult to adapt to business development , Do not conform to the FT Style . For business function testing QA buddy , It should be directly divided into business lines , Close to business and ensure quality , Business closed loop , Function closed loop , Power and responsibility closed loop ; Make tools 、 Platform QA Small partners should be directly integrated into R & D effectiveness , Form an industry research infrastructure team (infra team) Uniformly support the construction of production and research tool platform .

Take three examples ：

I joined the same city on May 8th quite late ,「 It is said that 」 There was also a big QA department , Later, it was dismantled . Some are left in TEG, Others are also divided into business lines .

Didi's quality department was also 500 people + Most of , Later, they broke up , Those responsible for business testing are directly divided into business lines ; do QA Tools 、 A large part of the platform is directly divided into the efficiency platform Department （EP）.

The quality and efficiency Department of Kwai has the largest number of people 700 people ？ More people than many business departments . It was not implemented for two years , Direct dispersion , Those responsible for business testing are directly divided into business lines ; do QA The part of the tool platform is directly transferred to the basic technology department .

The quality and R & D efficiency Department of Kwai initially had the shadow of this organizational structure , except PMO Is in CTO Next , Most of the others are the same , However, the quality and R & D efficiency department was finally dismantled .

In fact, I've been thinking about PMO Where should the location be ？ Direct reporting CTO, Holding the imperial sword , Kill the business leaders at the top and the minions at the bottom , Become the starting point for managing all business lines ; Or become the business assistant of the boss of the business line , Give advice on project management 、 Share worries and solve problems for business bosses , Solve the practical problems encountered by industry and research students in doing business ？ If you have good advice , Please also tell me , thank you .

Development strategy

In production research team 1000 Human company , The main functions of the R & D efficiency team and the production and research team are 200 People's companies are very different . The production and research team is 200 Human company , The main function of the R & D effectiveness team is to maintain a set of open source + R & D infrastructure built by commercial software , Ensure infrastructure availability 、 Stable , It can only solve the problem of whether or not . After all, manpower and resources are limited , The main business needs more investment . But to

The production and research team is 1000 This order of magnitude , In fact, we already have resources to do more and better infrastructure construction , Get started 1 To N, This paragraph is more interesting and valuable .

Why? ？

Labor costs have soared . Every Internet company , The labor cost is a big head . For each additional production and research student , Labor costs increase linearly , But R & D efficiency will not increase linearly , It may also increase the communication cost due to improper cooperation, and the team's capacity will decline .

Accumulated technical debt 、 Technical pit ： Raiding cities and land brings business growth , Also left behind a lot of technical debt that needs to be repaid 、 Technical pit to be filled . What I used to do with people , Now it's time to consider efficient approaches .

Cultivate internal skill , Authors efficiency ： When the growth rate of the industry is not so big , Doing a good job in internal infrastructure construction is also an effective means to improve the company's industry competitiveness .
The effect of R & D efficiency is related to the size of the team , And it's a multiplication relationship . The larger the team , Doing a good job in R & D efficiency will improve the efficiency and quality of enterprises .

On this scale , I suggest open source + Business software + Partially self built , Although the overall experience has a loss , But it can meet the functional requirements to the greatest extent with the minimum investment , At the same time, under the condition of limited resources, increase the proportion of self research , Improve the overall level .

The construction of R & D infrastructure is by no means overnight , It's too optimistic for a group of people to solve the problem of infrastructure construction in a few months . Otherwise, there won't be so many roast about infrastructure .

The only two teams that everyone likes are meituan and Ali , It proves that the infrastructure construction of these two countries is still very recognized .

Organizational structure advantages

PMO Always under the R & D efficiency , The platform tools +PMO Go down the business line together to promote EE The development of is particularly helpful ;PMO User demands collected from the business line , Part of it will be translated into the demand for an efficiency platform

The structure department and R & D efficiency are relatively close to each other , Therefore, the co construction of many frameworks and technical tools will be better promoted , Such as engineering specifications 、 Framework promotion, etc

The operation and maintenance department and the R & D efficiency department are also relatively close , Many of our infrastructure relies on the support of the operation and maintenance department , Cooperate with each other , For example, release function , restart 、 Grayscale 、 Resource management, etc

Unified infrastructure supporting industry research cooperation （ contain QA Platform construction ）, Maximize resource utilization , The boundary is reasonable and clear .

Team weaknesses

The boundary between the R & D efficiency team and the operation and maintenance team needs to be clear , In fact, sometimes it is not so clear , The principals of both parties need to know the general , Despite the big picture . The method of efficiency engineering department to solve this problem is relatively simple , The R & D efficiency team is responsible for the product development involving users , The operation and maintenance team of system management can be self built .

Because no 「 Big QA department 」, The R & D effectiveness team is right QA The team has low perception of business demands , We need to promote our work through continuous cooperation and joint construction .

Summary of practical experience

Find the right person

people , It's the first productivity . R & D efficiency is a relatively specialized field , When recruiting, we need to make a good distinction . How to recruit people can refer to this article 「 Find someone who can do R & D effectively 」. Nothing can be done. It's a small matter to find the wrong direction , If the business is done badly, it will affect the development of the company .

Experts in this field usually come from project management 、 Configuration Management 、QA、 Process improvement , Operation and maintenance , These people have practical platform operation experience ; With cloud computing 、 Cloud native development , Application operation and maintenance 、 A few architectures 、 R & D has also entered this field . Now you can recruit directly 「 R & D effectiveness 」「 Engineering efficiency 」「DevOps」 Related people . Recruit the best person you can recruit , These are valuable talents , It's hard to find people from first-line factories . For example, Alibaba cloud efficiency team 、 Ant R & D efficiency team , tencent TEG、PCG, Meituan R & D quality and efficiency Department 、 Baidu efficiency cloud 、 sound of dripping water EP etc. , I really can't find anyone to dig in these big factories , Of course, these teams are also recruiting , Interested parties can also contact :)

Just find the right person , It's easy to do later . Tauren has its own aura , How to build the corresponding team , Where does the company need to invest urgently 、 What kind of people are recruited to do what things ...... As long as you attract the right people, these things can be solved . The key is to recruit the right people , This is the key to breaking the game .

Set up a good team

Organizational structure is the second productivity . Only by building an organizational structure suitable for business development can we maximize the role of talents . You can't put it on display when you attract a cow , Give him team and resources . one can't make bricks without straw , Qiao Fu has asked us to come back , We're going to find her a dishwasher 、 Side dish 、 Pass the dishes , Only in this way can we make a good dish . I can't find something made by a cow man. It's rotten , We'll admit it ; If you find a cow man , Don't use , It's a pity that you can't use it well .

Go the right way

After all, the following team has limited information , Many times, the upper level can give more background information , In this way, we can find a right way to achieve . This requires adjusting measures to local conditions , see what can be done . Timing is too important , A lot of times are fleeting , Once lost , After thousands of hardships, it may not be possible . So they all say that the weather, the place and the people are harmonious , It's not the right place, the right people and the right time , Or when people and places are favorable .

I hope you can find a good company 、 Good leader 、 Good team , Enjoy your life 、 Sincere and kind , Do what you are good at and like to do .