Company Structure

Notes

• "Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds" are a really interesting solution to growing a startup without letting it get out of control.
• Whiteboards & Ping-pong tables
• Take monthly surveys of employee's satisfaction with the company, its direction, other employees, benefits, etc. on a 1-5 scale (for simplicity's sake), and then graph each different category's average over time to see what's getting better, worse, or stagnating.

Anthony's Plan

Three-phase "sprints" (which aren't much like SCRUM):

Planning

Everybody (not working on long-term projects) meets in a single meeting. They discuss how they achieved the last goal. New goals are set.

This meeting should be very short.

Allocation

Small teams form for each goal. For example, a team wanting to add a new type of Collection might include a DBA, a ruby dev, and a frontend designer. They take their desks into a workroom, and work on completing their assigned task.

Completion

When a workgroup's task is finished, they work on a number of minor tasks until the next planning session. If there are no minor tasks, the members split up and join groups that need new people.

Planning resumes when all small tasks are finished.

Overseers

Management positions get three to four workgroups assigned to them. These managers are responsible for code review and coordination.

Decomposition

This management style has the benefit of decomposing easily. Let's say we make it big and get a 100-person company. If this happens, we probably want to launch a new product.

So split the group in half. One half on ImageHex, the other on some other thing. Then both halves split into workgroups.

Employee Titles

Some companies (including those that make famous video games) don't have employee titles at all. This encourages creativity and a lack of bureaucracy. We're going to take a slightly different approach with the same intent.

Instead of getting a formal job title, you will have a Stat Block. If you've ever played D&D, think something similar. It's a list of skills and how experienced you are in them. We'll provide an Intranet which will display those statblocks (and other biographical information) to everybody, so they can pick and chose who to be on what workgroups.

So, for example, let's say you're looking for a front-end designer. You can sort employees by availability and design skill. Continuing the scenario, let's assume only Anthony and Connor are available.

You'll quickly see that Anthony has a -100 in all design categories, the lowest possible score. Meanwhile, Connor's scores are much higher. So you shoot Connor an email and ask for help. Twenty minutes of random rambling about "GRADIENTS" and "MUH JONY IVE" later, you've got a new designer helping you implement your ideas.

Other companies

Some other tech companies doing interesting things with their organizational structure:

• Elon Musk's tour of SpaceX
• "Guilds: Get Stuff Done Together" - Hootsuite
• "Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds"
• "Maintaining Quality at Scale" - Airbnb
• Valve's "New Employee Handbook"