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Killing Hierarchy 2: Successful Organization Design
The document discusses organizational design for startups, focusing on establishing values, roles, and processes. It emphasizes the importance of aligning hiring practices with company culture and operational strategies to drive success. The content suggests that while models for organizational structure are helpful, they must be tailored to each organization's unique culture.
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Killing Hierarchy 2: Successful Organization Design
- 1. What are yourorganization’s values? Tweet @Joaquin_V_Roca with #MODes
- 2. Killing Hierarchy: Organization Designfor Startups
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- 4. Agenda • Architecture – Groupingalternatives • Operational Processes – Connecting roles • AEIOU/Roles and Authorization • Evaluation checklist • Connection to culture, mission, vision, values, strategy
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- 8. CEO COO CFO Fin1 Fin2 Fin3 CTO Eng1 Eng 2 Eng 3 CMO Mar 1 Mar 2 Mar 3
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- 10. CEO Europe Americas North AmericaCentral America South America Asia Africa
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- 13. Product Engineering DesignMarketing Sales Support Engineering SupportSales Marketing Product Design
- 16. Prod Team SystemsEngineering Design Business Data Board Organization focused process Learn and share Product team Design Front end dev Data Status Systems All hands meetings Developmental meetings Marketing PR Cust spprt Office mgmt Team meet Team meet Team meet Team meet Team meet Team meet Team meet Boundary management Peer bonus Project management Back end dev Integrations Integrations
- 17. Prod Team SystemsEngineering Design Business Data Board Product focused process PR and Marketing (x3 in parallel) Project proposal Post the project on Trello Roadmap Server Maint Debugging (x3 in parallel) Cust Support Scoping Team assign Development (x3 in parallel) Testing (x3 in parallel) Push to Prod (sequential) Scoping Cust Support Cust feedbck Other Stuff Done Off Roadmap (technical debt, bug fixes, small enhancements) Demo Day
- 18. Organizational Capability Highly Important Niceto Have Not as Important Product Operations Customer Innovation
- 19. Organizational Imperative Great Fit GoodFit Poor Fit Culture Mission Strategy Operations Employee engagement Information flow Decision making Cost Politics
- 21. Hiring and OrgDesign • Question!
- 22. Hiring and OrgDesign • Attraction • Selection • Attrition
- 23. Culture • Be clearabout culture and hire to your culture – Culture is not ping pong tables and t-shirts – Culture is made up of values that reflect deep assumptions and manifest in artifacts like ping pong tables and t-shirts – If you assume business success comes from innovation and creativity comes from free thinking and thus value autonomy, hire people who can work autonomously – If you assume business success comes from operational excellence, and excellence comes from coherence and discipline, hire people who thrive in structured environments
- 24. What Works inPractice? • Question!
- 25. What works inpractice? • The models are good ways to organize your thinking • They are not normative for the most part • All of this really has to be fitted for your organizations culture • This is hard work and there is no one right way • You are going to get it wrong • Build, measure, learn
Editor's Notes
- #2 Use #MODes for questions during class
- #4 Organizational Psychologist ABD from ColumbiaI help NY startups gracefully scale their human systems.Most recent clients: SumAll, Harvest, Urtak, the Borough of Lansdale, PA, UN
- #6 Extreme HierarchyFormal vs. informal organization in hierarchyLiaison roles or cross-functional task initiating role relationship
- #7 How do you flatten an organization?Increase the span of control.Small span of control is 2Large span of control is 15How talented are your managers?How mature are your direct reports?
- #8 Stratified Systems Theory (Jaques)You shouldn’t report to someone who has the same time horizon as you.
- #9 FunctionalMost typical design
- #10 ProductGoogle would look something like this if they organized by product.When I was at Pfizer, they were moving away from Georgraphic to Product design.
- #11 GeographicSpeaking of Geographic, really large sales and service organizations are often-times grouped this way. Within georgraphy you may find functional or product based organizations
- #12 ClientIf you serve very different customers, they might have different needs. If your organization strategy revolves around customer segments, this might be a good way to organize.
- #13 MatrixOften when companies want to have two strong grouping types (usually function + one of the others), they’ll create a matrix organization.Benefits and costsSpotify?
- #14 Two views of operational processesEven how we visualize our processes speaks to our values.Important to get this rightIt is the combination of architecture and process that defines your organization design
- #15 Organic OrganizationSome examples of organic organizationsLess structured, more flexible.Fractal organizations may not look like your typical organization when put on paperYou might not be able to visualize it this way at all
- #16 At SumAll we have something similar to this for our architecture.Very clear understanding of the AEIOUs makes it unnecessary to have an org chart
- #17 Liaison roles and processesFormalAll hands meetingsCross-functional work groupsProject managersProduct managersRetreatsInformalLunchHappy hourHoliday partiesGame nightHackathons
- #18 Product process is different from organization-wide process
- #20 Your design should take into account:fit with your culture, mission, and strategyspeed and flexibility of decision making (are decisions centralized or distributed?)communication capabilities and how quickly data moves through your organizationeffect on employee engagementcosts, including resources and coordinationpolitics and power in your organizationamount of dependence on the informal organization
- #21 Sociotechnical Systems Eric TristLong wall coal mining was very good for resource recovery rates, but the invention of the conveyor belt and division of teams into specialized separate units messed up productivity. Why?Depersonalized workDecimation of work groupsA complex organization is a social systemSociotechnical systemsWork organizations are interdependent social and technical systemsA work system is the unit of work (e.g., the assembly line)The work group does the workWork groups monitor work systems; not the supervisorWorkers are complementary to machines, not an extension of them
- #22 Question:I'd *really* like to hear your thoughts on how hiring affects success in various organizational designs. In my experience, a lot of the ideal can break down when you have people who fundamentally operate a different way. Like people who have no personal tolerance for project tracking, todo lists, rules, or paperwork. When you transition to a more structured process, they struggle and push back. And people who may be great engineers, but are not pro-active communicators. They struggle in the sandbox because they aren't getting their ideas heard. What tricks are there for identifying the right personalities during the interview process that will fit with your organizational design objectives?
- #25 Question:When you present them, I'm always interested in which elements of them you see working well in practice vs. on paper. A lot of times there are good "ideal" mental models, but the devil is in the details. So which things you "enforce" and which things you "strive for" when applying them would be great.