/OrgDesign

Design Your Organization For The Conflicts You Want To Hear About

- Dave Kellogg tl;dr: “I have two rules for organization design: (1) Design for conflict. Specifically, design your organization for the conflicts you want to hear about. (2) Ensure value-add. Don’t put thing B under thing A unless the executive in charge can add value to both.”

featured in #560

Make An Org Chart You Want To Ship — Advice From Linear On How Heirloom Tomatoes Should Inspire Team Design

- Nan Yu tl;dr: Nan unpacks why founders should be suspicious of symmetry in their team structure, and offers a three-part framework on how to optimize for an “heirloom tomato” org chart.

featured in #539

Reshaping The Tree: Rebuilding Organizations For AI

- Ethan Mollick tl;dr: "AI is impacting organizations, and managers need to start taking an active role in shaping what that looks like. There is no central authority that can tell you the best ways to use AI - every organization will need to figure it out for themselves.” Ethan proposes some principles:" (1) Let teams develop their own methods. Given that AIs perform more like people than software, they are often best managed as additional team members. (2) Build for the oncoming future. It is clear that advanced models are coming fast. (3) Organizations that wait to experiment will fall behind very quickly. 

featured in #470

What Is Engineering Enablement

- Tal KimHi tl;dr: "Engineering Enablement teams’ main goal is to reduce complexity and improve development velocity and time to market by providing self-service solutions, engineering standards, and best practices. The team aims to enable developers to focus on business logic and puts an emphasis on developer experience and product quality." Tal discusses this team's role in detail, who they are and their purpose. 

featured in #280

How Organisations Are Changing

- Simon Wardely tl;dr: "Teams will often swarm around problems, leadership is transient in nature and leaders will arise to fit the problem. In this world, hierarchy is unimportant and few care about the top floor office or the status symbols of power. What motivates people are customer and societal outcomes. Outcome not output matters."

featured in #237

How Apple Is Organized For Innovation

- Joel Podolny Morten Hansen tl;dr: Apple has a functional organizational design - teams are structured around features i.e. cameras, not product categories i.e. iPhones. Three management traits are key: (1) Deep field expertise. (2) Immersion in details. (3) Willingness to collaboratively debate.

featured in #216

Work Is Work

tl;dr: Org design is fetishized by corporate America always looking for some hack. There isn't one. Organizations are imperfect and, at very best, scale linearly. Despite that, there are tips on how to design a scaling organization here.

featured in #169

The 5 Whys Of Organizational Design

- Kellan Elliot-McCrea tl;dr: When considering org design, a useful exercise is to walk down each level of the org by asking the 5 whys, this helps you understand where the pressures lie. The author runs through this and the common discoveries he's made when asking these questions.

featured in #140

The Five Types Of Communication Problems That Destroy Company Morale

- Cate Huston tl;dr: All company problems are communication problems of some type. These are broken into the following buckets (1) Lack of depth (2) Conflicting context (3) Missing empathy (4) Communication that triggers anxiety (5) Assuming unearned trust.

featured in #138

How To Evolve An Engineering Organization

- Will Larson tl;dr: The following are explained in detail (1) measure what you hope to improve (2) size the org against peers, goals and performance (3) structure into smaller teams (4) project growth (5) rest in between changes to master the current structure.

featured in #135