Is Your Dev Team TOO Big to Succeed? w/ SAIC’s Bob Ritchie

**Bob Ritchie** (0:00)
In the software world, I can't think of a case where anyone knows the right answer for even above an 80% threshold to maximize impact with customers.
To say definitively, build me exactly this in exactly this timeframe, and this will be your guaranteed result. The Team of Teams model gives you that flexibility.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
Over $30 billion in engineering wisdom will be at your fingertips at Interact on April 7th. Join engineering leaders from Netflix, Slack, Stack Overflow, American Express, and more at Interact, a free virtual community driven engineering leadership conference.
One day, 20 speakers, all selected by the thousands of engineering leaders in the Dev Interrupted community. If you are a developer, team lead, VP, or CTO looking to improve your team, this is the conference for you. Go to devinterrupted.com/interact to register today.

**Dan Lines** (0:50)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Bob Ritchie, Vice President of Software at SAIC, which stands for Science Applications International Corporation. Awesome name.
Bob, thanks for joining us.

**Bob Ritchie** (1:07)
Thanks for having me, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (1:09)
Yeah, it's awesome to have you be on the show today. Let's start by giving our audience the opportunity to know you a little bit better. For our listeners who may be unaware, what is SAIC, what do you do there?

**Bob Ritchie** (1:20)
Awesome, yeah, so SAIC is a federal government, federal systems integrator. And what that typically means is government contract work around engineering and science and research and development and IT managed services to drive solutions for the federal government, whether it's Intel Community Department of Defense or federal civilian agencies. And what I do there, I have the privilege of leading the software organization within the company. So really focused in on how do we make SAIC a software company that happens to deliver solutions for the federal government?

**Dan Lines** (1:52)
Yeah, you've been there a while, like 15 years, right? Yeah, I had a long time.

**Bob Ritchie** (1:57)
Where I was part-time consulting employee of SAIC in 2016 to 2019, where I was at the privilege of working for a really kind of forward leaning leader at Capital One named Gil House.
And then when he moved to JP Morgan in 2019, I had the chance to come back and take over the software org at SAIC full-time. And it just seemed like the right time to come back.

**Dan Lines** (2:19)
Yeah, that's awesome. What's the size of the org that you got on you?

**Bob Ritchie** (2:22)
So my direct line kind of team of teams model were at a little over 200 folks and then dotted line software within the whole companies, about 4,500 engineers.

**Dan Lines** (2:32)
That's great. We're going to dive into team of teams. We're going to talk more SAIC. I went to the website and I just have to say like the first two, I guess, you know, it's scroll. It's like a banner that scrolls, you know, left to right.
That's some of the coolest things, creating the connected battle space. That sounds interesting. And then the next one is mitigating drone threats.
It sounds like you get to that's like very, very interesting stuff.

**Bob Ritchie** (3:00)
There's definitely some unique and it will call it exquisite problem sets. Especially the Department of Defense and the Intel community that you wouldn't necessarily run into elsewhere. And so, yeah, like it was a wide range of, you know, not just building a web app or not just building a couple of APIs type of thing.

**Dan Lines** (3:17)
Yeah, pretty cool. Now, another thing about you, kind of like a more personal thing, I hear you played college ball at VTEC. Is that true?

**Bob Ritchie** (3:27)
So I have to put air quotes of playing. Yes, I was an unrecruited walk on, but yeah, I got to play. I had the privilege of playing Division 1 basketball in the Big East and ACC because my time there kind of spanned both conferences, which was really cool from growing up in the DC metro area and with Georgetown and Maryland and Duke and UNC always on TV to then get to play, thankfully, in the same conference that Coach K and Roy Williams and those guys were all still coaching when I played. So that was a really cool experience.

**Dan Lines** (3:54)
Yeah, I hear. I mean, that's a big time conference. And I know you're saying, yeah, I walked on, but you made the team, even making the team as a walk on, like, you know, the talent and the recruiting is insane. So that's really cool.
So speaking of teams, it leads us well to like the teams of teams stuff. So I know you have a lot of opinions on how teams should function in the software delivery process. So let's talk about that a bit. What is a team of teams model?