The concept of optimum in digital product developer work teams

Abstract

The article argues that the late-20th-century crisis in the social management of digital product developer teams exposed the social labor institution’s inability to manage competently using directive methods. This failure gave rise to a new, agile management methodology. The author contends that ensuring uninterrupted digital product delivery and maintaining a consistently high-quality pace of work requires identifying the social conditions that create an optimum. However, without a concept of the optimum—currently absent from the scientific literature—representative empirical research aimed at identifying its criteria is impossible. The methodological foundation draws on the work of Bogdanov, Hannan, and Freeman, who examine social phenomena as organizational systems that respond to environmental changes by forming new norms and patterns, as well as on the work of Etzioni, who studies the mechanisms of values and principles common to all social groups. The research methods include comparative analysis and synthesis of the scholarly literature by Russian and international authors on the concept of the optimum both in general and as applied to IT organizations, followed by inductive analysis of the data. Examining the specific social conditions that influence the optimum, the author classifies them into macro, meso, and micro levels. Based on this classification, the article concludes that the optimum in digital product developer teams is a brief period of equilibrium between forms of anomic behavior. This equilibrium is achieved through the interaction of specific social conditions across macro, meso, and micro levels, all aimed at fostering autonomy, self-organization, and self-reflection. These conditions enable teams to adapt to rapidly shifting market conditions while maintaining the pace of delivering a high-quality, competitive digital product.