Practice : Guilds & Chapters
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Guilds and Chapters are structured communities of practice that connect people with similar roles, skills, or passions across teams. They foster peer learning, drive shared standards, and amplify innovation through collaboration outside of delivery lines.
By creating space for professional development and cross-cutting alignment, Guilds and Chapters help organisations scale quality, support autonomy, and maintain coherence in complex environments.
Description of the Practice
- Chapters are often role-based (e.g. frontend chapter, testing chapter) and may have line management responsibilities.
- Guilds are usually interest-based (e.g. observability guild, AI guild) and are entirely voluntary.
- These communities meet regularly to share practices, solve common problems, and evolve ways of working.
- Activities include knowledge sharing sessions, lightning talks, RFC reviews, tooling alignment, and setting or stewarding standards.
- Guilds and Chapters bridge silos and help teams learn from one another’s experiences.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Identify shared skills, challenges, or interests that would benefit from a dedicated group.
- Launch lightweight meetups, office hours, or Slack channels to gauge interest and energy.
- Nominate facilitators - not necessarily managers - to guide coordination.
- Keep structure simple: timeboxed sessions, shared notes, rotating topics.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Align chapters with role expectations (e.g. career progression, skills matrices).
- Give guilds clear focus areas or themes linked to engineering priorities.
- Pair activities with standards work, internal talks, or platform adoption efforts.
- Rotate facilitators and showcase diverse voices across levels and disciplines.
- Measure value through feedback, contributions, adoption of shared practices, and impact stories.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Share generously - from experiments, wins, and failures.
- Invite guest speakers from inside or outside the company.
- Use guilds to pilot new tooling, standards, or techniques.
- Make participation safe and rewarding - not mandatory or political.
4. Watch Out For…
- Too much structure that limits creativity or overburdens facilitators.
- Communities that fizzle due to lack of support, leadership, or visibility.
- Chapters becoming top-down or disconnected from delivery reality.
- Failing to close the loop - inspiration without action.
5. Signals of Success
- Teams regularly apply and evolve what’s shared in guilds or chapters.
- Craft and capability improve without needing top-down enforcement.
- People feel part of a wider learning culture beyond their squad or stream.
- Guilds drive experiments, standards, and platform evolution.
- Chapter leads are empowered to shape discipline health and impact.