Snap Inc.

Snap Inc. is a California-based camera company most known for their pioneering social media platform “Snapchat”. Snap Inc. has seen remarkable growth in its number of daily active users since launch, leading to the company’s highly anticipated, and highly successful, IPO in March of 2017. Despite this success however, many are beginning to become wary of Snap Inc.’s ability to replicate this success due to the company’s lack of transparency.

Due to a fear of copycats, Snap Inc. has built a culture of secrecy in which employees do not work within a central location and all product innovations are kept under wraps. As a result of this, both employees and shareholders of Snap Inc. are often left in the dark when it comes to organizational goals and long-term plans and have become increasingly dissonant.

In order to remain successful, Snap Inc. must maintain secrecy, but curb the negative effects associated with it. It is recommended that Snap Inc. makes a change to their bureaucratic structure to become more horizontal, establish two defined company headquarters, and hire an investor relations manager. By including horizontal linkages within their structure, Snap Inc. would be able to maintain secrecy by implementing a separate innovation team, along with a regular day-to-day operations division. These divisions would be separated geographically through the implementation of two separate headquarters, which would maintain inter-divisional secrecy but increase cohesion amongst employees working within the same departments. Finally, by hiring a investor relations manager, select information could be released to company shareholders, reducing any uncertainty surrounding Snap Inc.’s company roadmap. By implementing these changes, Snap Inc. will be able to avoid copycats while creating strong investor and employee relations and be able to see substantial future growth.