A friend of mine from college joined salesforce.com (yes, all lowercase is the proper spelling — it’s a late 90s dot com thing) right after he finished business school and has been there for several years. At last year’s Dreamforce conference I was asking him about their engineering department and how they structure on-shore/off-shore software development. He said all the R&D is done in San Francisco in a pod-like setup similar to yesterday’s post on pods at Rackspace.
Here’s some info on pods in R&D at salesforce.com:
- There are roughly 28 different teams/pods
- Each team focuses on a specific module or piece of a module in the product
- The pods have one product manager, roughly five engineers, and a QA person
- Each pod does a daily stand-up scrum meeting led by the product manager
- The large number of product managers allows each of the small teams to stay close to the customer and minimize the telephone game where details get lost in layers of bureaucracy
The pod approach makes it easy for salesforce.com to scale their R&D by adding more and more pods as the business grows while staying agile and innovating quickly.
What else? What do you think of the pod approach to scaling R&D?
David Cummings on Startups 
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