Equal Experts Unveils 'Multi-Service Teams' to Revolutionize Software Maintenance Mode

Steve Smith, Global Head for Modernization and Platforms at Equal Experts, has introduced a radical solution to the perennial ‘maintenance mode’ problem in software development. Traditional approaches, where either operations teams manage all maintenance or delivery teams maintain services in the background, consistently fail to deliver desired outcomes such as increased capacity, reduced costs, protected service reliability, safeguarded future feature delivery, and improved job satisfaction. Smith’s proposed model, dubbed ‘multi-service teams,’ offers a specialized structure designed to achieve these critical objectives by dedicating teams to the maintenance and operation of low-demand services within specific product verticals, upholding the ‘you build it, you run it’ ethos.

This multi-service team structure facilitates reassignment or resizing of delivery teams, directly translating to increased capacity and reduced costs. Service reliability is protected as these teams possess the necessary technical skills, domain knowledge, and operational incentives, operating with a more limited cognitive load focused on a single product domain. To combat senior developer disinterest in maintenance work, Smith recommends staffing multi-service teams with junior engineers, providing invaluable early career experience in real-world responsibility and business understanding. Critical guardrails for this model include a clear, organization-specific definition of ‘low demand’ services, assigning multi-service teams distinct identities named after their product vertical, and establishing documented, consistent service transfer criteria between all team types. This outcome-first approach, heavily reliant on robust platform engineering, positions maintenance mode as an inevitable maturity phase, encouraging organizations to proactively prepare for it rather than fight against it.