The document discusses moving from a flat organizational structure to one with more hierarchy and leadership roles at a company. It notes that as engineering teams grow past a certain size, the flat structure breaks down, and it's time to consider roles like VP of Engineering or Director of Engineering. However, it emphasizes that these new leadership roles need clearly defined responsibilities and expectations to avoid confusion and ensure accountability. It advocates creating an engineering ladder or level system to establish clarity around hiring, pay, promotion criteria and growth opportunities for team members at different career stages.

1. Moving Towards Structure
Camille Fournier
CTO, Rent the Runway
@skamille

2. My Story
• Grew Rent the Runway’s engineering team
from ~12 to 55 and counting

3. My Organizational Goals
• To create a relatively meritocratic
environment
• To limit bias
• To develop the leadership talent on my team
• To hire a diverse workforce

4. Flat
• We start flat, except of course for “the
founders” or perhaps “the executives”
• First you have 3 directs
• Then 5
• Then 10
• Then… you start to break down

5. Time to add some structure!
• Maybe I’ll hire a VP of Engineering!

6. How about a Tech Lead?
• Great I’ll take my most senior/favorite dev and
make them “Tech Lead” of some of the
software

7. Perhaps a Director of Engineering
• Not quite VP, not quite Tech Lead

8. Either way, your flat is dead
• It was never true anyway, so it’s probably for
the best

9. What does this new leader DO?
• They make my life easier, of course!

10. No, really
• I dunno. They handle…
– Project Management!
– People Management for part of the team!
– All Management so I don’t have to!
– Architecture!

11. If you don’t know, you’re set up to fail
• Inevitably, this person is going to not read
your mind exactly the way you wish they did
• How do you know whether they’re
incompetent or just confused?
• How do you hold them accountable when you
don’t know what they’re SUPPOSED to be
doing?

12. “They’ll define the role themselves!”
• If you hire someone who has done this job
before and you have a shared context, that
might be ok
– IE, you both worked for Google, and you hired a
senior manager at Google to be a Director of
Engineering

13. A bad, but common, case
• HR hires people with random titles based on
what you said you needed to hire
• “Frontend Engineer”
• “Lead DevOps”
• “iOS Specialist”
• Pay people directly based on experience and
whatever HR magic formula

14. Creating Clarity
The minute you create hierarchy, you
need clarity

15. The Engineer Ladder: What
• The list of job levels and the description of
what goes in each of those levels
• BEST PRACTICE: Above Senior Engineer, has a
separate path for “Manager” vs “Individual
Contributor”
• A device to create clarity on your team and, if
done well, limit bias

16. The Engineering Ladder: Why
• Gives you a framework for hiring, paying,
promoting
• Forces you to become more clear in what you
expect from people
• Forces you to push that clarity into your hiring
process and possibly hire better
• Gives your team a growth path that helps
them imagine their future with you

17. Creating an Engineering Ladder
• Step 1: Ask your friends for theirs
– Step 0: Make friends with people who have teams
big enough to justify a ladder
• Step 2: Be realistic about how it applies to
your team
– You may not need all the levels. You may need
more levels.
• Write it up. Get feedback. Rewrite it.
• Share it.

18. I really don’t want to do this
Why not?

19. I’m afraid everyone will be clamoring
for titles
• They probably will when you roll this out BUT
• This gives you the chance to make it clear to
them what success looks like!
• Give them something to work towards!
• Give you both a framework for talking about
how they are succeeding and how they are
not

20. Expect some anxiety
• Ladder rollouts do generate anxiety around
upward mobility
• On the flip side, with no ladder, people that
care about upward mobility leave for a better
title elsewhere

21. I’m afraid people will think they should
be promoted who aren’t ready
• Well then, that is why you need to be very
clear about what you expect at each level
• People will want to be promoted with or
without a ladder, if you have any sort of
leadership
• They’ll also want bigger pay, more options,
bigger projects
• How do you determine who gets what?

22. I’m afraid titles will cause us to lose
voices of others
• It takes more than “no titles” to ensure that
voices are actually heard

23. There are more paths to excellence
than climbing a ladder!
• True! And a ladder doesn’t take the place of
other training
• Embrace add-ons, badges, specialties

24. Premature optimization!
• True. You probably don’t need to do this when
you have only 1 non-founder/executive
“leader”
• But the minute you need 2…

25. Your vibe is a function of your company values and culture
Do you know what your company values are?
It is very possible to design a ladder to reflect and reward those values
WHAT ABOUT MY VIBE?

26. I’m the CTO, this isn’t my job!
• Like hell it isn’t
• If you are very lucky, you might find a VPE to
do this for you
– I would not hold my breath
• This isn’t rocket science. If you can architect a
system, you can architect a team.

27. Conclusion
• Clarity Clarity Clarity
• Clarity