Mission-Aligned Teams: The Evolution of the Single-Threaded Ownership Organizational Model Designed for Startups and Scale-ups
or — We can’t all have Amazon’s resources to do STO
Henry Shi, Co-founder, Super.com
Michael Abramovich, Chief of Staff, Super.com
Table of Contents
– Introduction
– Our Functional Model Was Not Working
– Seeking a New Organizational Model
– Introducing the Mission-Aligned Team (MAT) Organizational Structure
– How MATs Work at Super.com
– Operating MATs Day to Day
– How we Rolled out MATs at Super.com
– Benefits of the MAT Model for Super.com
– Challenges
– Implementing MATs at Your Organization
– Conclusion
What’s the Crux of This Post?
At Super.com, we developed an organizational model that goes beyond Amazon’s Single-Threaded Ownership model. It’s a hybrid functional/single-threaded model that provides the focus and accountability of STO with the coaching and mentoring of the functional model. That model is called Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs) and it’s a much cleaner model than Amazon’s for startups and scale-ups.
Introduction
Super.com is a fast-growing technology company in the travel and fintech industry. In 2022, Super ranked 35th on Deloitte’s fastest 500 growing technology companies in North America. In 2023, Super ranked 11th on Financial Times’s list of the America’s fastest growing companies. We crossed $1bn in total sales within 6 years of our founding and keep growing.
Our mission is to help everyone keep as much of their hard-earned money as possible, so they can experience more of the best things life has to offer. Check us out at super.com/about. We’ve also published our Ways of Working to share with anyone interested in working with us.
From mid-2021 until the end of 2022, we doubled the size of the organization to about 250 employees, and so were rapidly hiring product, data, engineering, operations, finance, and other technical and business talent.
Our company had a functional organizational model that evolved naturally out of rapid growth and scaling. “We need another data resource” meant quickly hire and have that resource report to a Data manager and up to the functional Head of Data. This served us well early on, but as we kept adding people and business scope, we noticed challenges in focus and accountability. We were slowing down in project velocity and we began to see people perform deep functional work that was removed from the customer and the business (continuing the data example, imagine a lot of work on data infrastructure for tables that no one in the business actively used). We were moving more slowly and with less business impact to our work. That was a problem.
Drawing inspiration from Amazon and other best in class tech companies in STO models, we reorganized into a “Mission-Aligned Teams” (MATs) structure, where the entire company was organized into small, cross-functional teams headed by a MAT Lead. MATs are a hybrid of the Amazon-like Single-Threaded Ownership model where a MAT Lead drives execution for a small team and has the accountability and focus that comes with that ownership. However, the MAT Lead does not have P&L ownership and is not responsible for people and performance management. Instead, employees still report to functional managers as coaches for their development. MATs get the best of both organizational models.
We carefully rolled out MATs at Super.com and have seen much more focus, accountability, and clarity among our team members. Our OKR completion rates have increased by just under 10%, and only 6% of employees disagree with the change to the MAT structure a year later. When we survey employees, qualitative feedback consistently outlines that everyone works better in MATs than they did before. MATs have completely transformed the way we plan and execute work, and the company operates with much more ease all through top-level planning to in-the-details execution.
Read on to understand our Mission-Aligned Team organizational structure, how Super.com rolled out MATs, and how such a structure may be able to help your organization.
Our Functional Model Was Not Working
As we were functionally organized, each functional organization ran its own work planning processes, and tried to come up with its own prioritizations. Prioritization for projects differed across functional teams, so one team would be working on something another had deprioritized. Many of our functionally organized teams also ended up far removed from customer and business problems.
During execution, project ownership and structure was unclear, with unclear accountability. It took a lot of time and meetings to make decisions. Work was often “tossed over the fence” — literally necessitating that teams write a Jira ticket on “their” functional board and then transfer it to another team’s board, hoping it got done.
The “fix” for this was aligning at the start of the quarter on OKRs between functional teams, but this required a tremendous amount of coordination and negotiation, and we ended up trying to pre-plan entire quarters of initiatives, which did not work with our growth trajectory and the agility we had to have as a startup.
Shreyas Doshi gave this quote on Lenny’s Podcast, and we found this to really capture how we were seeing day to day work at Super.com
So as a leader or say [sic] a director of product or VP of product responsible for one of these teams, you’re now charged with fixing [an] execution problem so we can move faster. So you do a dozen meetings to figure out what’s going on, you try to diagnose the issue, how to better align. And then you talk to your peers on the other side, and then you decide, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do to solve this execution problem. We are going to create a new review process.” And so, we are going to create this process and we are going to review priorities on a regular basis across these two teams. And then we are going to also as the managers of these individual teams to do regular one-on-ones so they can stay in sync. So this type of scenario is extremely common, again, especially in high growth organizations that want to accomplish a lot.
Amazon explains the challenges of skill-based (i.e. functional) organizations on their AWS Blog; we saw many of the same challenges
The legacy skill-based [i.e. functional] model compels enterprises to utilize project-based teams (project teams), where work is broken up and spread across several skill-based teams. This model necessitates multiple points of coordination and negotiation among teams to establish expectations, prioritize work, and synchronize deliveries. This is all very inefficient and prone to miscommunication and slow execution, and teams can easily become overburdened.
We were optimizing for more meetings and more processes so we could align on OKRs and projects earlier and earlier. So what worked? Some extremely important projects in the organization were working well. They would have:
- A clear leader — who had the trust of leadership and was empowered to make decisions
- Clear prioritization — people on these projects were usually told to always do this work first and often we would rewrite or even ignore functional OKRs to reinforce the importance of such a project
- Cross-functional collaboration and coordination — with a minimal number of recurring meetings but lots of ad hoc communication with the project team to move the project forward. The key here is the project team was meeting outside of their functional organization
We were operating in a world where we could get just the most important stuff done, but that efficiency did not extend to the rest of the work we were doing. We noticed these projects and teams were operating outside of the “normal” functional teams and OKR coordination processes, so we wondered if we could use this operating model across the business.
Seeking a New Organizational Model
We conducted research of organizational models and supplemented that with first-party interviews of leadership at comparatively sized technology companies, especially at companies where leaders indicated that functional organizations were slowing them down. We saw that Single-Threaded Ownership models (like at Amazon) drive clear focus and accountability and were a step in the direction of what we needed.
There is lots of literature on Single-Threaded Ownership (STO), especially as implemented at Amazon. We like Jade Rubick’s writing, and Amazon has an explanation on their AWS blog. Hopper also has put together a clear explanation of how STO works at their organization on their webpage. STO’s small, cross-functional teams, with a single accountable leader who spent the vast majority of her time in one business domain was exactly how we were running our high-impact projects.
However, the STO model had some challenges for Super.com and many fast growing startups and scale-ups:
- From an engineering perspective, for true STO, you need individual contributing engineers all to report into an engineering manager who then can report into the single-threaded owner. This requires larger teams, and requires the scope of each STO be large enough to support an entire engineer plus engineering manager squad. We don’t have such a large organization to support so many complete engineering squads. We saw a lot of value from 1 or 2 embedded engineers inside of cross-functional teams. Much of the magic we saw was pairing business and engineering talent closely, and as a tech company, many things we do require an engineer. We wanted a model that supported this, without having to quadruple the size of our engineering teams
- Single-threaded owners classically get full P&L responsibility. A strong P&L owner deep business sense and experience in the business area, as well as a breadth of management skill to operate at the top of very different functions — product and operations, for example. Such people are hard to find if they are to also have the operational range to drive a team forward and drive outcomes
- Finally, single-threaded owners staff teams and are responsible for people management and career development within those teams. In practice, this requires really senior team members to minimize the amount of performance management necessary to operate the team, since the single-threaded owner cannot afford to spend as much time on people management as a functional lead can. A common tradeoff is the P&L owner has great business sense and strategic acumen, but teams have to settle for a poor people manager.
Overall, true STO teams are hard to assemble, expensive to operate by necessitating very senior talent, unaccommodating for non-senior employees who may be very strong in their own right, and require very rare multi-talented owners with huge operational range and deep experience.
At Super.com, we want employees at all levels, and we believe employees should uplevel with the organization. We wanted to retain the skill growth and mentorship teammates get from their functional managers and found that to be key to upleveling an organization, which was lacking in STO.
Introducing the Mission-Aligned Team (MAT) Organizational Structure
Wanting the benefits of both STO and functional models, we created a hybrid organizational model called Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs). A MAT is a cross-functional team of 6–10 people who work together to execute against long-term goals, which we call “missions.” We liked the term “Mission-Aligned” team because the language could apply to both customer and non-customer facing teams. The mission statement of the team drives clear focus and clarity for everyone in the MAT. The team benefits from its small size and is quick and nimble to execute at a startup pace, and is staffed with all the cross-functional resources it needs to accomplish its mission and control its own destiny.
Central to the MAT model is the role of the MAT Lead — a directly responsible and accountable individual endowed with decision-making authority over their team, like in the STO model. This accountability grants autonomy to the MAT Lead and the team, and lets the team figure out how to best accomplish their mission. We’ve found that the autonomy energizes teams, and often leads to better decisions than arms-length functional managers or executives would have made.
The MAT Lead controls what MAT teammates work on and when, but does not have people management responsibility over them. People Management is handled by functional managers as coaches. Functional Managers set best practices for the function, review work output, and handle performance management for their reports. Many functional managers are on MATs themselves as well (they can handle MAT work and their functional coaching).
MAT Leads are guided by an executive (either C-Suite or General Managers) to ensure all the MATs fit together in the business as a whole. The executives retain overall P&L responsibility so the MAT Lead can focus on driving missions without the overhead of managing the P&L. MAT Leads are execution-focused, but can also drive strategy. If we have very strong strategic skills in a MAT Lead, the model allows an executive to partner with the MAT Lead to set the strategy. We don’t penalize a lead for not having both strategy and execution skills as STO would, and the MAT Lead gets to develop their strategic thinking over time with coaching from the guiding executive.
We compare and summarize STO and MATs below.
Internally, to set the expectations for MAT Leads, Super.com publishes an internal “job description” for a MAT Lead — a portion of that is here.
What does it mean to be a MAT Lead?
You are the leader of a team aligned behind one of the core “missions” of our organization. Your job is to lead, inspire and bring together a cross-functional team to execute against your mission. They’ll look to you for inspiration and direction!
As the leader, you are responsible and accountable for your MAT OKRs and the strategic projects/initiatives your team pursues (i.e. its roadmap).
This will require process, influence, and leadership to keep your team on track and deliver. You’ll need to stay aligned with your GM/executive champion and stay aligned with any other MATs that may work adjacent to you.
The MAT model, as a hybrid between STO and functional models, has been very successful for Super.com — we get many of the benefits of STO without the challenges of that model.
How MATs Work at Super.com
With the MAT model, MATs meet among themselves and handle work planning and execution within their teams. MATs bring a sense of purpose and direction to team members because each team is organized around a specific mission, so teammates know why they come to work each day.
We no longer have ambiguous project ownership and competing priorities as a result of work planning and execution happening in functional silos. Task tracking is done in Jira boards at the MAT level so we no longer transfer Jira tickets across functional boards and hope the work gets done. We eliminated the recurring coordination meetings and tracking documents between functional teams. We no longer have to pre-plan every project and coordinate OKRs at the beginning of every quarter to have a chance at the work getting done. While we reassess and reprioritize work as a startup should, it’s done at the MAT level and the team can change their direction quickly.
While we encourage autonomy to MATs and let the teams decide how work gets done inside of them, we do require some standard operating processes to ensure everyone knows what each MAT is working on.
MAT Standard Operating Processes
- MAT-Level OKRs: Each MAT sets its own Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) quarterly with input from the executive team. These OKRs crystalize the mission and ensure work aligns with the company’s overarching goals and objectives. After that, MATs are free to decide what initiatives they will pursue to hit their OKRs.
- Two-Week Planning Windows: All MATs at the company, including teams with and without engineers, operate on a two-week planning cycle. This cadence encourages teams to both plan work they can reasonably deliver in two weeks and allows for the agility required in a startup to pivot given any new data or information learned.
- Minimum Reporting: MATs provide regular updates on their progress through short, written reports every two weeks. This minimum reporting requirement fosters transparency and accountability. Anyone can read these updates and ask questions, which ensures that those outside of a given MAT can follow its work, and provides a clear way anyone with expertise can advise a MAT.
- Clear Roadmaps: MATs maintain a clear roadmap that outlines their priorities and objectives. These roadmaps are accessible to anyone within the organization, minimizing any possible collisions, and allowing for discussions about the strategic direction of any MAT.
Operating MATs Day to Day
With the MAT working structure in place, the focus and work of the entire company (with some exceptions, such as the HR and Legal teams) could be represented in 22 MATs and we could see what the company was working on in one spreadsheet. Executives know exactly what work is getting done where and have built trust with the MATs and their Leads. Employees introduce themselves to each other first by what MAT they are on, and only second by their functional role.
Our MAT Leads span many functional backgrounds and job levels. Out of 22 MATs, about half are led by Product and Engineering talent. Half the MATs are led by other business and non-technical talent, and the takeaway here is that MATs can be used across a company, and not just inside of your technical or engineering teams. Additionally, our MAT Leads span many job levels, from Level 1 Product Managers to Level 8 VPs.
A great success of MATs has been empowering emerging business leaders to succeed and have impact inside of a tech company with the appropriate engineering resources to do so. We show some example MATs from Super.com below — note the ambitious nature of the Missions.
For Super.com, MATs are a fundamental shift in how we approach organizational focus and scalability. By providing a clear framework for team allocation, MATs enable us to be honest about the number of initiatives we can realistically tackle at any given time. If we identify a new mission to focus on or a new area of the business to invest in, we can hire people into that mission and form a new MAT. When we rolled out MATs, we stopped just throwing projects over the fence and expecting them to get done “somewhere” in the organization. We became intentional about what we wanted to work on and how we would get it done.
How we Rolled out MATs at Super.com
As with any large organizational change, we took a measured approach to rolling out the MAT structure. Here’s how we navigated the process.
Benefits of the MAT Model for Super.com
MATs have seen both quantitative and qualitative benefits in the organization. We’ve seen just under a 10% bump in OKR completion rate quarter over quarter (for example 61% to 67% OKR completion in 2023 Q4, where we define an OKR complete at 70%), and within the bump, we complete more just about 20% more P0 OKRs (instead of P2s). A year into our MAT model, less than 6% of employees disagree with this organizational model. Employee sentiment remains high.
The list of qualitative benefits is long:
- Improved Alignment and Clarity: With clear ownership and accountability assigned to each MAT, ambiguity and confusion became relics of the past. No longer were projects bogged down by “too many cooks” or conflicting priorities. Instead, each team operated with a singular focus, aligned with the company’s overarching mission and goals
- Enhanced Collaboration and Communication: MATs fostered a culture of collaboration and open communication, breaking down silos and facilitating cross-functional teamwork within the MAT. Gone were the days of “tossing work over the fence” or waiting endlessly for dependencies to be resolved. Instead, MATs work seamlessly together, leveraging teammates’ strengths to drive collective success
- Increased Productivity and Efficiency: The streamlined decision-making processes inherent in MATs empowered teams allow them to move with agility and purpose. With MAT Leads at the helm, empowered to make decisions swiftly, decisively and independently, projects gained momentum and progress accelerated. This led to increased productivity, improved cycle times, and a greater capacity to tackle ambitious initiatives
- Elevated Employee Engagement and Satisfaction: MATs empowered team members to take ownership of their work and contribute meaningfully to the company’s mission. The sense of purpose and autonomy afforded by MATs fostered a greater sense of fulfillment and satisfaction among employees, leading to higher levels of engagement and retention
- An Organization that’s Easier to Run: It’s much easier for the executive team to understand what’s being worked and who is working on it. It’s also become much easier to focus on new areas of work and change the missions on teams
Challenges
While the transition to Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs) brought about significant benefits, we do work on some challenges over time.
- MAT Lead is a Hard Job: One of the initial challenges we faced was the need to identify and train MAT Leads. The skillset to lead a small team can be hard to identify, and we’ve occasionally had to change MAT Leads. However, through our MAT Training Camp and ongoing leadership development efforts, the vast majority of our MAT Leads thrive
- Functional Leaders Cede Power: As work happens in MATs directed by MAT Leads, functional leaders transitioned from being decision-makers to becoming expert advisors and performance coaches for their respective MATs. Unequivocally, this works well, because now it’s the MAT Leads who spend all of their time focusing on one problem, instead of the functional leads who must spread their energy across many domains. However, this still required functional leaders to relinquish some of their authority in the service of the new model. We’re lucky to have a strong collaborative culture at Super.com where our leaders embrace what’s best for the organization
- It’s Tempting to Staff People on Multiple MATs: To create fully cross-functional MATs, there is always a temptation to assign individuals to multiple MATs. For example, it can be tempting to assign a data resource supporting two MATs in two different business areas because both MATs want data support. This is very difficult for the resource, who must track context for two different teams at once. We track the number of employees on multiple MATs quarter over and quarter and work hard to ensure everyone is only on one MAT. The exciting outcome here is that employees have learned new skills to best contribute to MATs — for example, learning Amplitude as a reporting tool to self-serve data needs and eliminate the need for the overlapping data resource
- Rebalancing MATs is Challenging: Making changes to MATs is a challenge. Changing MAT Leads is disruptive, as is redistributing talent so everyone has new teammates. Sometimes we have to do this, but we try to make small changes to MATs — add or subtract one resource to minimize disruption. When we have new Leads, we usually have the exiting Lead stay in the MAT for some time to train the new one. We’ve learned that changing a MAT’s mission, but leaving the MAT itself together, is much less disruptive than changing the people, so we try to leave teams intact whenever we can. Executives meet quarterly to propose, review, and agree on MAT changes. We’ve disbanded several MATs as their missions were complete, which we make sure to celebrate loudly throughout the organization
Implementing MATs at Your Organization
If you find that your organization has slowed down in delivery, is stuck in loops of dependencies, and people are never quite sure what to work on or who is responsible for what, MATs may very well be for you, especially if your organization is not well-suited to classic STO (which most resource constrained startups and scale-ups are not). Here are some highlights as you think about rolling MATs out at your organization:
Conclusion
The transition to Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs) has been a transformative journey for Super.com. By reimagining our organizational structure around clear missions and small, cross-functional, empowered teams, we get alignment, collaboration, and efficiency on a scale we did not know was possible. We retained our functional reporting for employee skill development, functional best practices, and career growth. Employees, managers, and executives are almost universally happier. While challenges exist and we keep tweaking our model, we’re in a much better place with MATs.
With some of the tips here, we encourage other organizations to explore how MATs could benefit themselves. Organizational change is hard, but can be extremely effective and rewarding, as it was for Super.com. Feel free to reach out to us at Super.com if you’re curious to learn more about MATs or want to chat about organizational startup and scale-up design.
