Operating Model Design Mastery - Expanded Project Guides
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OPERATING_MODEL_DESIGN_MASTERY.md
Overview
This collection of 12 hands-on projects teaches you how to design, implement, and evolve high-performance operating models. You’ll learn to define team interfaces, ownership boundaries, and service expectations that minimize coordination overhead and maximize autonomy—effectively applying Conway’s Law to align organizational structure with technical architecture.
Operating Model Design is the engineering of the organization itself. Most companies suffer from “Coordination Tax”—the massive overhead of meetings, handoffs, and misaligned priorities that slows down delivery. These projects teach you to identify, quantify, and eliminate organizational friction.
Core Concepts
Before diving into projects, understand these foundational ideas:
- Conway’s Law: Organizations produce systems that mirror their communication structures
- Team Topologies: Four fundamental team types (Stream-Aligned, Platform, Enabling, Complicated-Subsystem)
- Interaction Modes: Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, Facilitation
- Cognitive Load: Teams have finite capacity—overload kills velocity
- Service Boundaries: Interfaces between teams must be explicit and predictable
Project Index
| # | Project | Difficulty | Time | Key Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Team Interaction Audit | Beginner | Weekend | Mapping organizational friction |
| 2 | Team Service Interface | Beginner | Weekend | Defining team APIs |
| 3 | Ownership Boundary Mapper | Intermediate | 1 Week | Accountability and governance |
| 4 | Escalation Logic Tree | Intermediate | 1 Week | Incident response design |
| 5 | Platform-as-a-Product Blueprint | Advanced | 2 Weeks | Internal platform strategy |
| 6 | Cognitive Load Survey & Heatmap | Intermediate | 1 Week | Measuring team health |
| 7 | Service Level Expectation Agreement | Intermediate | 1 Week | Defining quality contracts |
| 8 | Dependency Spaghetti Visualizer | Advanced | 2 Weeks | Untangling organizational debt |
| 9 | Operational Readiness Review System | Intermediate | 2 Weeks | Production quality gates |
| 10 | Incident Response Battle Cards | Beginner | Weekend | Crisis management protocols |
| 11 | Internal Service Catalog | Advanced | 1 Month | Organizational metadata |
| 12 | Cost of Coordination Calculator | Advanced | 2 Weeks | Economic modeling |
Learning Paths
Path 1: Team Lead / Engineering Manager (4-6 weeks)
Start with visibility and documentation, then move to measuring team health.
- P01: Team Interaction Audit - See where friction lives
- P02: Team Service Interface - Reduce “random questions”
- P06: Cognitive Load Survey - Measure burnout risk
- P10: Battle Cards - Prepare for crises
- P07: SLE Agreement - Set expectations with partners
Path 2: Platform Engineer / Architect (6-8 weeks)
Focus on technical-organizational alignment and system design.
- P08: Dependency Visualizer - See the spaghetti
- P03: Ownership Mapper - Define accountability
- P11: Service Catalog - Build the phone book
- P05: Platform Blueprint - Design self-service
- P09: ORR System - Quality gates
Path 3: Organizational Designer / VP Engineering (8-10 weeks)
Full coverage for those redesigning entire organizations.
- Complete Path 1 first
- P08: Dependency Visualizer - System-wide view
- P12: Coordination Calculator - Economic justification
- P05: Platform Blueprint - Strategic planning
- P11: Service Catalog - Operational foundation
Prerequisites
Required Knowledge
- Basic understanding of software development lifecycle
- Familiarity with at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience working in a team of 5+ engineers
- Understanding of basic project management (sprints, backlogs, standups)
Helpful But Not Required
- Experience with site reliability engineering (SRE)
- Previous exposure to Team Topologies or domain-driven design
- Experience with incident management
- Basic knowledge of graph theory
Development Environment
- Markdown editor (VS Code, Obsidian)
- Python 3.9+ (for data analysis projects)
- Graphviz or Mermaid.js (for visualizations)
- Access to collaboration tools (Slack API, calendar data) for some projects
Key Resources
Essential Books
| Book | Author | Relevance | |——|——–|———–| | Team Topologies | Skelton & Pais | Core framework for team design | | Accelerate | Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Metrics of high-performing teams | | Site Reliability Engineering | Google | SLOs and operational excellence | | The Site Reliability Workbook | Google | Practical incident management | | Domain-Driven Design | Eric Evans | Bounded contexts and ownership | | Principles of Product Development Flow | Reinertsen | Economic modeling of coordination |
Tools Referenced
- Backstage.io: Service catalog platform
- PagerDuty / OpsGenie: Incident management
- Grafana / Datadog: Monitoring and dashboards
- Mermaid.js / Graphviz: Diagram generation
- NetworkX (Python): Graph analysis
Project Comparison
| Project | Technical Depth | Organizational Impact | Immediate Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| P01: Interaction Audit | Low | High | Visibility |
| P02: Team Interface | Low | Medium | Reduced interruptions |
| P03: Ownership Mapper | Medium | High | Clear accountability |
| P04: Escalation Tree | Medium | High | Faster incident response |
| P05: Platform Blueprint | High | Very High | Developer experience |
| P06: Cognitive Load Survey | Medium | High | Team health data |
| P07: SLE Agreement | Medium | Medium | Reduced conflicts |
| P08: Dependency Visualizer | High | Very High | Architectural clarity |
| P09: ORR System | Medium | High | Production quality |
| P10: Battle Cards | Low | High | Crisis readiness |
| P11: Service Catalog | High | Very High | Discoverability |
| P12: Coordination Calculator | High | Very High | Executive buy-in |
Capstone: The Organizational Digital Twin
After completing the core 12 projects, you can attempt the ultimate integration project: building a simulation platform that combines:
- Dependency Visualizer (P08) data
- Service Catalog (P11) metadata
- Coordination Calculator (P12) economics
This “Digital Twin” allows you to simulate re-org scenarios:
- “What if we move Payment Gateway from Fintech to Platform?”
- “What if we split Checkout into Cart and Billing?”
Outputs include expected changes to lead time, cognitive load, and coordination costs.
Success Criteria
After completing these projects, you will be able to:
- Diagnose organizational friction using data-driven methods
- Design team boundaries that minimize coordination overhead
- Quantify the cost of organizational complexity in dollars
- Implement governance without creating bureaucracy
- Build platforms that teams actually want to use
- Prepare for incidents before they happen
- Create self-service interfaces between teams
- Make the case for organizational change to executives
Last updated: 2025-12-29