Organizing for Software Product Development: The Effects of Team Structure, Product Complexity, and Cross-Team Coordination.

This article examines how software development team structures—specifically feature teams organized around end-to-end customer-centric functionality and component teams organized around technical subsystems—affect performance under varying levels of product complexity and cross-team coordination. Using an extended NK fitness landscapes computational simulation model, the study validates the mirroring hypothesis, showing that aligning team structures with either the problem space (user requirements) or solution space (technical components) improves development outcomes, with feature teams generally outperforming component teams, especially in complex problem spaces. The research highlights that the effectiveness of structural mirroring diminishes as software complexity increases but can be compensated by appropriate levels of cross-team coordination, where moderate synchronization frequency often yields optimal performance. Additionally, the study finds that broader team scopes (underfitting) can better manage interdependencies in complex environments when coordination is costly or infrequent, particularly benefiting component teams. These findings offer a contingency-based framework for managers to tailor team organization and coordination strategies according to the specific complexities of software products to enhance delivery speed and quality.