Organisation Structure: Flat or not…

As the team began to scale and operate on multiple products across disciplines and departments, I would like to reflect on how we can structure and group teams together to operate. Organisation structure is important to get right in order to work more effectively. I would like to base my observation on Chris Savage’s post What Happened When We Ditched Our Flat Org Chart. One quote from Chris’s post that struck me is:

There’s always a structure whether or not you define it.

In the beginning (2 years ago), our Digital engineering organisation is intentionally flat. The idea is to allow fast decision making and autonomy, and to reduce management overhead. The most famous example as described in this Forbes article:

The most famous example of this comes from Valve, the gaming company responsible for classics such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, and many others. At Valve there are no job titles and nobody tells you what to work on. Instead all the employees at Valve can see what projects are being worked on and can join whichever project they want.

The challenge with a flat organisation was that as the team grew it became difficult make decisions as often decision making required inputs from multiple teams or parties that may have very different points of view. This in turn became difficult for teams to be accountable for decisions and ultimately delivery. This is echoed by the same Forbes article:

The lack of structure can also make accountability and reliability a bit of an issue as well.

The other side of the coin is when individuals became bottlenecks as every single decision required their presence. As indicated by Chris’s post:

Being really flat meant that certain decisions had to be centralized because no one knew who to turn to.

A the team scales, we require more suitable organisation structures. We looked organisation structure whereby it becomes clear on the roles and the responsibilities of individual teams and team members. It also helps distribute decision-making across the organisation.

Often or not though, the problem does not lie on deciding on the most appropriate structure to implement but on the appropriate way to implement it. This requires constant communications with teams and team members to ensure everyone is informed with and made aware of:

• What problems we are trying to solve.
• Why we are looking into organisation structure as possible solutions.
• Actively getting feedback on choices and implementation.
• How we are going to implement the agreed organisation structure.