Planning Dependencies at Scale - How an Atlassian team gets stuff done when it needs other teams

At some point in a software organisation's growth, the self-contained ""2 pizza team"" will struggle to deliver a feature or product without work from another team. This ""roadmap coupling"" can cause havoc and heartache, especially if the commitment from the team being depended upon is not rock solid.

This problem is especially challenging when you work in an internal Platform team. For “consumer” teams the pain is real - how can they quickly bring capabilities to market while waiting for a platform team to catchup. For platform teams, they see consumer teams re-inventing platform capabilities becase they “cannot wait”. In my role as Head of Engineering of Atlassian Automation Platform, I live and breath this every day, and Atlassian’s processes bring some sanity to the mayhem.

Atlassian has created and refined a "COMMIT" process to tackle this specific problem. In this talk I will:

• Describe when and why this process was created
• Step through how it works
• Talk through the benefits and downsides
• Provide some practical ideas on how to adopt it in your organisation