This is a tweetstorm about what I’m learning about company organizational structure, alignment, and how to innovate rapidly while scaling. Disclaimers: 1. Learning from other companies often means de facto survivorship bias 2. I’m not an expert, just learning as fast as I can
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Those teams tend to be very autonomous and are designed to not require central sign-off. One owner is responsible for each OKR set and get help from centralized units (finance, for example) as needed. Duplicate work isn’t frowned upon as coordination to avoid that is so difficult
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Management relies heavily on those units to understand about what’s happening, and tries to have frequent reporting as a means of understanding as much as accountability. Andy Grove famously turned Intel around on a dime based on a single memo from a field salesperson.
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Teams are built to be fully functioning units. There isn’t often a monolithic “engineering” organization, but a couple of engineers assigned to each team. You’re grouped by task/objective not skill set. Amazon refers to itself as “hundreds of little startups.” That’s powerful
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2. OKRs (objectives/key results) have been written about in a dozen books, with google being perhaps the strongest advocate. You can get 90% of the information in a single page here: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/introduction/ …. They work.
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3. Leadership of these teams means 100% ownership of results no matter what happens, and a huge number of companies consider who those people are is incredibly important
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That concludes the last couple weeks of trying to learn as quickly as possible. Books: Measure what Matters by Doerr 7 Powers by Helmer The Outsiders by Thorndike In the Plex by Levy Anything Andy Grove has ever written or said, but particularly High Output Management
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If you’re only going to read one book I recommend High Output Management
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End of conversation
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