Hadar BismutBoaz Adato, who leads HoneyBook's engineering guild, shared in an article on Medium (opens in a new tab) how and why the company realized it was time to build a guild.
Like every good story, it happened somewhere in the transition from a small startup to a large organization, with all the growing pains that come with it.
Users, teams and deployments piled up, and something started to creak: too much code with "no owner," duplicate solutions to similar problems, recurring incidents, teams operating like startups within a startup, and engineers who no longer felt they belonged to what they had built.
He describes how the guild started in the most organic way possible: conversations between tech leads about recurring challenges they were dealing with. Over time, they started organizing cross-organization initiatives, prioritizing them, and figuring out together what was really worth the effort. Little by little, the shared work became a real guild that:
- Brings together representatives from all teams to share knowledge, solve technological challenges together, and work on cross-organization initiatives.
- Defines working principles for all engineers and creates a shared language.
- Gives people the option to spend 20% of their time on the Guild Task Pool to lead improvements to code and infrastructure without waiting for approval from above.
- Puts the excellence of its engineers front and center, a signal they sent the whole company when they started meeting in the office's open space instead of small, remote meeting rooms.
Their guiding principle throughout was to create shared ownership with tight coordination, rather than a steering committee that everything has to go through.
Here too, not everything went smoothly. Some teams didn't jump on the idea. They worried the guild would take up time, be a distraction, or take away their autonomy. It took time and proof in the field, but in the end the guild became a space that connects all the engineering teams.
When the time came to work on products and solutions around AI, it was much easier for everyone because there was already great infrastructure for collaboration: the guild gathered ideas and conclusions from different teams' experience working with AI and turned them into a shared way of working that let them keep developing at a fast pace while keeping their standards.
In the end, engineers need community too, and in this case HoneyBook built an excellent guild that lets the whole organization move faster and helps engineers feel they've arrived at their professional home.
Want to hear it from Boaz himself? Listen to my conversation with him on From the Inside.