Engineering and product should be unified, not separate
Splitting Engineering and Product into separate organisations creates friction, blame, and slow loops. Keep them together.
Tagged: organization
11 posts
Setting up a team of teams
How to transition from a single team to a team of teams without losing speed, clarity, or accountability.
Your brand marketing needs your best analytical talent
Brand marketing has big budgets, sparse data, and complex decisions. It deserves your best analytical people — not your worst.
How to settle fights for development time
Stop negotiating development time sprint by sprint. Allocate by quarter, let teams decide how to use it, and eliminate the arm wrestling.
Hiring your first "techie"
Hiring your first technical person is one of the most consequential early decisions you'll make. Here's what to look for and what to avoid.
Functional organization can sometimes be good for you
A counterpoint: sometimes functional organisation is the right call. Here's when centralising actually makes sense.
Litmus tests: are your teams set up well or badly?
Three quick tests to tell if your teams are organised well or badly — before the problems become obvious.
Organizing by function creates overhead you don't need
Functional org structures look clean on paper. In practice they create bottlenecks, unclear ownership, and a lot of wasted meetings.
Setting up teams to get sh** done: the 80% Rule
Introducing the 80% Rule: each team should be able to deliver 80% of its mission without depending on anyone else.
Six easy pieces: the essentials of setting up a new venture
Six principles for setting up a new venture properly: founders, autonomy, people, relationships, space, and governance.
Org for new ventures matters. A lot.
Organisation is the most under-rated factor in new venture success. Get it wrong early and you're building on sand.