[jrd259]

I'm at Amazon and am the senior developer on my team. For the last few months an "away" team has been adding a feature to a service I own. It's only n of 1, but the process worked well. I did the high level design and ensured alignment on requirements. The away team did an excellent job of learning our code base. The new feature required a tricky refactoring of some of our oldest and most rotten code, which I did myself as it seemed too hard for an away team.

I saw no sign at all of the away team compromising on quality to meet deadlines.

[gregw2]

I am using a similar concept to scale my team's impact at a F100 company; making processes and ways for other teams to contribute code that is otherwise bottlenecked to/by us but ends up getting owned by us.

It's worked for the last year or two semi-effectively, but I am loving this discussion for reminding me of the downsides/risks.