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 · World Congress 2021

2:30 min

Breaking down team silos and overcoming group thinking

Mustafa Toroman · World Congress 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 · World Congress 2022

More from World Congress 2026 Europe

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA) thumbnail
29:17
3 months 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
3 months 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
3 months 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
3 months 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
3 months 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
3 months ago

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

Axel Ebert, Karin Krobath

Related videos

Open Source Is Not Just Code: Designing Communities That Actually Scale thumbnail
23:42
World Congress 2026 Europe • 3 months ago

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

Sinduri Guntupalli

Monoliths: A love story thumbnail
43:07
World Congress 2021 • over 5 years ago

Monoliths: A love story

Adam Mullen, John Collins

How Sparking Developer Joy Unlocks Developer Productivity thumbnail
31:59
World Congress 2023 • about 3 years ago

How Sparking Developer Joy Unlocks Developer Productivity

Anu Bharadwaj

We adopted DevOps and are Cloud-native, Now What? thumbnail
34:46
World Congress 2022 • over 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
World Congress 2024 • about 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
World Congress 2025 • about 1 year 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.