Here’s one point I find helpful (particularly if you’re a director-level thinking of restructuring this way.) If you don’t have the utmost confidence that your entry-level managers can hire/have hired a balance of people to effectively take on the responsibilities of a stream-enabled team, you’re not ready to work this way.

A team of backend specialists will really struggle if they are suddenly given complex frontend work, and vice-versa. Plus, if you typically have teams of -4 engineers, that means that even one person being out can be catastrophic to your team’s balance. Or if you pick up a project that suddenly increases a specialist burden, you have to find the right enablement team or move people around the org. Expect that to happen often (perhaps even quarterly?) depending on your stream and product team.

You can also hire fullstack, but beware that they need to be truly fullstack in a way that is really rare. It will probably require a bigger salary commitment across your teams.