WeAreDevelopers Logo WeAreDevelopers
Sign in
For You LIVE
World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

Five Ways to Break Silos in Your Engineering Organization

Daniel Schniepp

Breaking engineering silos doesn't require top-down mandates or massive budgets. Discover five grassroots strategies to drive cross-team collaboration and build collective ownership.

Pause
Mute Enter Fullscreen
#1 about 3 min

Encountering organizational silos in enterprise environments

Joining a large enterprise often reveals rigid team structures that hinder collaborative engineering efforts.

#2 about 2 min

Creating grassroots testing and tech practice communities

Establishing self-driven discussion groups like testing Tuesday fosters intrinsic knowledge sharing outside formal team boundaries.

#3 about 2 min

Driving inner-source collaboration through shared infrastructure

Creating shared infrastructure and monorepos allows teams to adopt inner-source models and take collective ownership.

#4 about 4 min

Reviving connection with internal conferences and hackathons

Organizing low-budget internal tech conferences and hackathons counteracts remote work fatigue and builds momentum.

#5 about 3 min

Facilitating engineering job rotations and expanded ownership

Offering flexible opportunities to swap projects empowers engineers to take ownership without relying on top-down assignments.

#6 about 5 min

Aligning decoupled teams using platform golden paths

Implementing empowering structure and architecture decision records prevents unaligned engineering teams from re-isolating.

#7 about 2 min

Securing management support and finding personal passion

Receiving adequate managerial autonomy and finding personal passion are underlying prerequisites for driving grassroots change.

#8 about 2 min

Lowering intimidation to encourage open technical communication

Fostering an approachable culture ensures technical expertise is shared without intimidating peers.

#9 about 2 min

Understanding participation metrics in engineering community groups

Embracing the 1-9-90 community dynamic helps leaders accept that most members will observe rather than actively contribute.

#10 about 3 min

Knowing when to adjust or stop internal initiatives

Iterating on successful collaborative models involves knowing when to split, adjust, or sunset older activities.

#11 about 6 min

Audience Q&A on remote engagement and startup culture

Answering audience questions on engaging remote engineers, handling human connections across organizational charts, and scaling up startup culture.

Matching moments

2:08 min

Navigating and mitigating the impacts of broken engineering cultures

Oskar Kruschitz Oskar Kruschitz · Europe 2026 Virtual

6:41 min

Breaking down organizational silos to define platform engineering culture

Liam Hurrel +1 · WWC 2021

2:30 min

Breaking down team silos and overcoming group thinking

Mustafa Toroman · WWC 2021

2:02 min

Breaking organizational silos to drive actual cultural transformation

Rudi Bauer Rudi Bauer +1 · Cappuccino with HR

1:43 min

Summarizing the organizational benefits of platform engineering

Christian Strack · LIVE

2:37 min

Aligning project communication and breaking enterprise silos

Kai Geißelhardt +1 · WWC 2022

More from World Congress 2026 Europe

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA) thumbnail
29:17
about 1 month ago

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA)

Michael Kagan, Sead Ahmetović

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote thumbnail
19:41
about 1 month ago

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote

Christian Heilmann

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend thumbnail
32:06
about 1 month ago

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend

David vonThenen

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes thumbnail
35:13
about 1 month ago

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes

Irina Branovic

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬 thumbnail
24:23
about 1 month ago

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬

Jeremy Murray

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat thumbnail
30:26
about 1 month ago

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat

Axel Ebert, Karin Krobath

Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Culture Doesn't Scale Itself: Leading Engineering Teams Through Hypergrowth and the AI Transition

Thanos Baskous

VP of Engineering and Co-founder of Cogent Security

Thanos Baskous
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

The path to Staff Engineer and beyond - staying on the IC train

Graham Gilbert

Senior Staff Engineer at Airbnb

Graham Gilbert
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Lessons from 20 Years of Bootstrapping an Open Source Business to $50M+

Peter Farkas

Percona, Founder

Peter Farkas
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Merging at Scale: From Broken Builds to Green Mainline

Manjari Akella, Preetam Dwivedi

Manjari Akella
Preetam Dwivedi
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

The Broken Rung: How AI is Rebuilding Software Development from the Ground Up

Tomislav Tipurić

Chief Technology Officer, Nephos

Tomislav Tipurić
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Agentic Drift: keeping pace with your agents

John Coghlan

Senior Director, Developer Advocacy at GitLab

John Coghlan

Related videos

Open Source Is Not Just Code: Designing Communities That Actually Scale thumbnail
23:42
WWC Europe 2026 • about 1 month ago

Open Source Is Not Just Code: Designing Communities That Actually Scale

Sinduri Guntupalli

Monoliths: A love story thumbnail
43:07
WWC 2021 • about 5 years ago

Monoliths: A love story

Adam Mullen, John Collins

How Sparking Developer Joy Unlocks Developer Productivity thumbnail
31:59
WWC 2023 • almost 3 years ago

How Sparking Developer Joy Unlocks Developer Productivity

Anu Bharadwaj

We adopted DevOps and are Cloud-native, Now What? thumbnail
34:46
WWC 2022 • about 4 years ago

We adopted DevOps and are Cloud-native, Now What?

Bruno Amaro Almeida

Roadmapping and Collaboration Best Practices to know you're building the right thing thumbnail
25:14
WWC 2024 • almost 2 years ago

Roadmapping and Collaboration Best Practices to know you're building the right thing

Shilpa Airi

What you can learn from an open-source project with 500 million downloads thumbnail
29:31
WWC 2025 • 12 months ago

What you can learn from an open-source project with 500 million downloads

Dennis Doomen

Related articles

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.