All of our Org design articles

People & Culture

How to Intentionally Design Your Org, From Square’s Former CEO

Former Square CEO, AWS's first GM and 12-year Microsoft veteran, Alyssa Henry, walks us through the two crucial considerations for organizational design — your business and your people — and how to connect them.

Management

Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on How Heirloom Tomatoes Should Inspire Team Design

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, has advised dozens of startups of all stages and sizes. He 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.

Engineering

“Get Off the Floor” and Other Career Advice from Microsoft, Looker, Reddit & Twitter

Nick Caldwell's resume includes an enviable list of companies — Microsoft, Reddit, Looker and Twitter. He shares his biggest lessons from each for a crash course in finding success across different company cultures, scales & functions.

PR & Marketing

From Instant Pot to Instagram: Critical Lessons in Startup Community Building

Bailey Richardson (an early Instagram hire and current partner at People & Company) has studied ordinary people who started extraordinary communities. Here, she shares the nuts and bolts of how startups should approach community building, highlighting eight valuable lessons on how the best communiti

Engineering

How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg

Will Larson has developed a framework for the optimal size and state of engineering teams—not only so managers can lead them in a highly efficient and effective way, but with a deeply empathetic and ethical approach.

Design

Defining Growth Design: The Guide to the Role Most Startups are Missing

Angel Steger serves as our guide on a trek to better understand the still developing speciality of growth design. She shares lessons learned from her roles leading the function at Dropbox and Pinterest, and outlines tactics for early-stage startups looking to source, interview and onboard growth des

Must-reads

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2018

We've rounded up 30 of the best insights from the articles we published over the last year. Read on for a time-capsule-like toolkit, full of the best tactical wisdom that seasoned company builders had to offer in 2018.

Management

Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent: Four Rules for Scaling

Engineering leader Varun Srinivasan had a front-row seat as Coinbase scaled to meet an explosion in demand for cryptocurrencies. Here, he shares the four org design rules they relied on to gear up for hypergrowth.

Management

Read This Before Joining as Employee 1 to 20 at a Startup

Should I work for a startup? Before deciding, find out here the best employee tactics to survive in a starting business and thrive as an early employee.

Engineering

Veteran CTO (with Multiple Successful Exits) Answers Your Top Startup-Building Questions

Adil Ajmal has built several standout technical organizations from scratch to successful acquisition. Here, he answers the toughest questions from our community.

Design

Our 6 Must Reads for Building and Leading a Product Design Team

A well-thought-out design team often accompanies enduring product design. Here are six pieces of advice to help you build and lead a design team from the sole designer to a larger design organization.

People & Culture

Fighting Factions: How Startups Can Scale Without Mutiny

Between them, eero's David Loftesness and BCG Digital Ventures' Alexander Grosse have held engineering leadership roles at Twitter, SoundCloud, Amazon/A9, issuu and Nokia. Throughout their careers, they’ve noted a silent force that can be particularly damaging to a fast-growing company: factions.