Put People in the Right Places

Four considerations when designing your organization

Even if you hire great people and nurture them, you’ll likely fail if you don’t build the right structure to support what you’re trying to accomplish. An ideal organization structure does four things very well:

1. Supports business and technical objectives. Conway’s law is crucial to consider: “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” For instance if you’re moving to microservices and don’t have a single team on point for leading the charge, you’ll inevitably end up reinventing the wheel many times over and end up with a lot of technical debt that slows you down in the long run.
2. Enables different portions of the organization to operate with minimal coordination. The more teams depend on each other to accomplish their tasks, the more roadblocks and slowdowns they’ll encounter along the way. While there will always be some dependencies, do what you can to minimize them.
3. Places strong leaders in every part of the organization. Teams inevitably stumble without strong leadership. An inordinate amount of time is often spent managing a “weak link” and you should try to prevent an obvious one from appearing by putting capable leaders in place in all parts of your organization.
4. Aligns individuals with their interests. Scientific studies have shown time and time again that intrinsic motivation leads to higher performance when performing creative tasks. You should take advantage of this by aligning individual contributors with tasks and projects that interest them. A big part of doing this is making sure they’re on the right team.