Building a new future for your business through AI and adaptive hiring

Everything is shifting.

The global economy. Budgets and headcounts. And technology, of course. Through all of this change, teams remain at the heart of what companies do – especially technology teams.

They innovate, build, and ship, driving value for our businesses and our customers. As market conditions shift dramatically, these teams also have to change. It’s time to rethink how tech teams are structured, how they function, and how we build them in the first place.

Whether you need to assemble a high-performing crew of technologists from scratch or want to add some talented new faces to your existing squad, here’s what you need to know about building tech teams today.

“To truly become a high-performing agile organization, you must look at your organization structure differently and be willing to change your mindset and behavior.” – Tom Godden, Director, AWS Enterprise Strategy

Why Your 40-Person Meeting Is Destroying Innovation

Bigger teams aren’t always better. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argues small teams are more focused, collaborative, and efficient: “You want teams to be small. You want to do a lot of things relative to the number of people you have. Otherwise, you just have 40 people in every meeting and huge fights over who gets what tiny part of the product.”

Amazon’s famous two-pizza model is another example of small but mighty teams. As CEO, Jeff Bezos once explained, “We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas.” At Amazon, that means teams with no more than five to 10 members.

You could joke that Amazon probably saves lots of time and money on pizza delivery. But smaller teams have actually saved the company time and money on software delivery. In a whitepaper, Amazon said compact teams can often cut through red tape to get real results: “You want this to happen as quickly as possible, so you can have a smaller go-to-market time. You don’t want the transformation to be a slow-moving process; you want an agile approach where waves of changes start to make an impact.” The two-pizza model also led to the creation of AWS, which now generates a big slice (18 percent) of Amazon’s total revenue overall.

Both Altman and Bezos contend that teams don’t have to be big to make a huge impact. Small teams just need to be agile, enabled by the right tools and resources, and laser-focused on high-impact goals that actually move the needle.

The Cross-Pollination Effect: When Marketing Meets Machine Learning

Besides being small, Amazon’s two-pizza teams were also cross-functional.

A cross-functional team is about diversity: the members have different skills and expertise, which contribute to success in very distinct ways. It’s the opposite of a ‘functional’ team, which gravitates towards similarity: members with similar skills, knowledge, and experience perform very similar functions.

While a ‘functional’ tech team might include designers, software developers, and engineers, a cross-functional team could have experts in wide-ranging disciplines like data science, AI, engineering, product development, design, marketing, and customer service. In a cross-functional team, each member brings a unique expertise and perspective to the table, raising questions other members might not even think of beyond their own siloed domains.

This diverse thinking can spark innovation, lead to creative problem solving, and quickly suss out issues that could cause domino-effect complications later on. Cross-functional teams are often less hierarchical because they’re aligned to the specific goals of a project or product rather than the ongoing goals of one department.

According to the Interaction Design Foundation (the world’s largest online training school for UX design), cross-functional tech teams tend to be more focused on customer experience: “Everyone can see how each department influences the customer journey and experience. This holistic approach leads to better products, services, and user experience.”

Isn’t the customer what it’s all about?

Rise of the Prompt Engineers: Tech Roles That Didn't Exist Five Years Ago

The AI talent war is forcing a complete rethink of how teams are built. While companies scramble for the 645,000 qualified AI technologists to fill 1.3 million open positions, some leading organizations have stopped playing the traditional hiring game entirely. Instead of just plugging AI specialists into old structures, they're building AI-native teams from the ground up; weaving "digital labor" directly into team DNA, creating hybrid squads where AI agents function as actual team members, not just sophisticated software. Here’s a hot list of AI talent you need to hire:

The new AI team roster:

• AI Product Managers who translate business strategy into AI capabilities
• Prompt Engineers who craft the instructions that make AI systems actually perform
• AI Ethics Officers ensuring responsible deployment at scale
• Human-AI Interaction Designers optimizing the collaboration between carbon and silicon

These new roles aren’t separate AI teams bolted onto traditional structures. Rather, they're integrated into cross-functional squads where every team member understands how to work with AI, creating what IDC calls the "continuous cycle of upskilling" that prevents entire teams from becoming obsolete as AI evolves at breakneck speed.

How Platform Teams Accelerate Software Innovation

Platform engineering is another approach to tech teams that could revolutionize digital transformation.

Platform engineering equips a software team with the right tools and processes to make them as efficient and productive as possible. A library of common architectures, information, and technical elements serves as a foundational base for the team members, who constantly update and improve the platform. It can be categorized as:

By 2026, 80 percent of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery – up from just 45 percent in 2022.” – Gartner Research

Platform engineering focuses on agility, adaptation, and constant improvement. Those same principles are the key to building all software engineering teams today, says Gartner VP and analyst Joachim Herschmann: “Organizations must move beyond traditional hiring practices and focus on building teams with high talent density. Leaders should cultivate a culture of continuous learning and collaboration to attract and retain skilled professionals who can adapt and grow with evolving business needs.”

The Talent Topology Revolution: Hiring at AI Speed

Here's where platform engineering becomes a talent multiplier. According to research from The Register and Andela, platform engineering principles can revolutionize not just how teams work, but how companies source and structure talent itself.

Traditional hiring struggles with what the research calls the "time-to-fill" problem; roles taking months to fill while projects stall. But when you apply Team Topologies thinking to talent acquisition, you can strategically assign skills and resources based on specific business goals rather than generic job descriptions.

The framework helps organizations understand exactly what skills they need and where. Need specialized AI expertise for a complicated subsystem? You know precisely what kind of engineer to source and how they'll integrate with existing teams. Building a new product stream? You can assemble the right mix of skills for that specific stream-aligned team.

Companies using this approach report sourcing talent 66% faster at 30-50% less cost than traditional methods, with AI-driven matching providing relevant candidates in as little as 10 seconds versus the typical 72 hours.

AI + Human Teams

Although there’s no ‘I’ in the word ‘team,’ author Ken Hubbell says there’s definitely a place for AI within teams. The former CEO of Soffos.ai urges organizations to stop thinking of artificial intelligence as an appliance to be used by teams.

“AI is more than a facilitator or a passive tool. It’s a vital team member, propelling efficiency, sparking innovation, and enhancing employee well-being.” – Author and AI Expert Ken Hubbell

Hubbell predicts AI will redefine how teams collaborate, grow, and engage, elevating the essence of human teamwork rather than merely supporting it. He views AI as a collaborative partner for teams that can unlock unprecedented productivity and creativity for them. Hubbell believes AI will create new possibilities across the stages of ideation, market research, design, prototyping, development, refinement, user testing, production planning, and launch.

That’s already playing out at Reddit. “Our teams can now dream up an idea one day and have a functional prototype the next. It’s that fast,” says the company’s Chief Product Officer, Pali Bhat.

AI can empower teams in ways we never imagined before. By automating repetitive, low-value tasks, AI frees up teams to focus on more creative and strategic stuff, making their work more interesting and fulfilling. (Not bad for talent retention either.)

Still, adopting AI isn’t enough. As AI automates basic tasks like coding, McKinsey analysts say enterprises have to rethink the way tech teams function and how they’re built: “Companies will want to strongly consider investing in new ways of working – retraining their teams to align with new organizational structures, talent and capabilities, and tooling and platform shifts.”

When Silicon Becomes Your Coworker

These are chaotic times. Technology is advancing swiftly as the global economy fluctuates wildly. Tech teams need to be more agile, more efficient, and rapidly scalable. That’s why more companies are taking a global, borderless approach to building them.

Deloitte says “companies [are looking] beyond current geographies for global software engineering talent” due to three factors: a shortage of onshore talent, accelerated customer demands for digital experiences, and intensified cost pressures in an unsettling economy.

“Software delivery is more globalized than ever before. Companies are increasingly relying on globalized models to drive innovation and new product development.” - Deloitte

For some organizations, that means quickly assembling an entire borderless team. For others, it means strategically recruiting a few international technologists to take an existing team to the next level. A borderless strategy not only expands your company’s access to tech talent, it also brings more diverse skills and perspectives to your teams.

The Global War for AI Experts

Building great tech teams in 2025 means building great AI teams. That requires a global talent strategy because the best AI engineers, data scientists, and AI product managers are distributed across Nairobi, Lagos, Rio, and other emerging tech hubs worldwide. Companies that restrict their AI hiring to local markets will find themselves building yesterday's teams for tomorrow's challenges.

Andela is a trusted leader with a proven track record of building and supporting world-class technology teams for more than a decade. Streamline your hiring process by finding vetted, high-quality talent that matches your company’s unique needs.

Don’t let economic pressure and a shortage of crucial skills break your technology teams. Build them better and faster by going global.