Autonomous product teams thrive when central engineering services deliver self-service, automated, well-documented capabilities that cut coordination overhead and speed delivery.
The Financial Times built an Engineering Enablement group whose sole purpose is to give product teams the tools they need to move at their own pace. By turning vendor integrations, DNS changes and security scans into discoverable, self-service capabilities, the group removes the need for engineers to wait on tickets or approvals. The result is code that can go live in minutes instead of months.
The team consolidated documentation into a single "Tech Hub", added a GitHub bot that auto-approves straightforward DNS changes, and introduced a lightweight proposal process for cross-team impact. Governance meetings are open and recorded, giving transparency to decisions like switching DNS providers. These practices keep capabilities secure, compliant and maintainable for years while providing cost and usage insight to the teams that consume them.
Because the FT could spin up servers and push code to production in minutes, its DORA metrics jumped dramatically. The organization now measures impact through developer surveys, operability dashboards and cost visibility rather than ticket counts. The key takeaways are clear communication, visible metrics, and relentless decoupling of teams through automation and documentation.
Check out the full stdlib collection for more frameworks, templates, and guides to accelerate your technical leadership journey.