This week on First Round Review, we delve into org design with a three-part framework optimizing for "taste" over symmetry.
Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on How Heirloom Tomatoes Should Inspire Team Design
Tomato season is in full swing, and while you're probably thinking about caprese salads and gazpacho, we're thinking about... org charts. Stay with us here.
“If we think of the org chart as a tomato, weirdly irregular yet delicious heirloom tomatoes are the better product, not perfectly symmetrical — but ultimately bland — spheres," says Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear.
Yu has developed a strong affinity for these farmers’ market favorites throughout his career. After leading technical and product teams at Everlane and Mode, and advising numerous early to mid-stage startups, he noticed a pattern in team structures, especially in product.
Many companies were following "the Spotify squads" model, an agile design approach from 2012 that groups people into small teams (usually around 5-8 engineers per PM) focused on narrow product slices. But this design doesn’t always work out.
“What founders slowly discovered over time is if you break up your teams into little bits, and ask them each to cover a narrow scope that’s mutually exclusive from the other teams, it’s probably not going to work,” Yu says. “They ran headfirst into Conway’s Law.”
While Conway's Law, connecting organizational communication and system design, may be familiar to founders, Yu contends that startups fail to take action on its crucial insight: You will ship your org chart.
“If you believe that you're going to ship your org chart, then you should make an org chart that you want to ship. The differentiation that every startup has in their product should then be reflected in their teams,” Yu says.
Pulling from his presentation at this year’s Figma’s Config conference, Yu breaks down the three essential components of the “heirloom org chart,” — weaving in examples from Linear’s actual team design to illustrate it in action. Here’s a sneak peek:
- Shape: “When you read management books about org design, they always show you these perfectly balanced charts. Symmetrical tree diagrams and curated grids that fill up to the margins. But creating a pretty-looking chart is not a KPI,” Yu says.
- Size: “If you’re a startup, chances are there are a few things that make your product truly different. These are the areas to over-provision. Leave enough slack on those teams. Not just to build the first version. But to deal with inevitable user feedback, maintenance, bug reports, polish,” he says.
- Scope: “Just because you can point to a component of your product, doesn’t mean you should have a dedicated team for it. Some things are pure table stakes, the kind of stuff you want to do as little as possible,” he says. “The default number of people working on it should round to zero.”
Founders and product leaders are bound to gain a fresh perspective on focus with this seasonally appropriate framework. But there’s one last caveat to keep in mind. “All startups and products look different from each other. So their org charts should look different from each other too,” Yu says.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Can’t get enough org design? Check out our podcast episode with Square’s Saumil Mehta for a behind-the-scenes look at Square’s latest re-org
-On asking for help (even when you don’t really want to)
-A guide on how to create an effective pricing page
-Molly Graham’s post on normalizing “work grief”