An organizational methodology that reflects our values
We’re rethinking the way our technical organization works - borrowing a few pages from places that have innovated in this area, but also building on top of those approaches and extending in different directions.
The best of feature and functional teams
Functional teams are key when investment in infrastructure is the emphasis, and feature teams are most effective when maximizing product delivery.
As we are focused on both, we organize our engineers into Lego-brick sized functional units. These units consist of 2-5 engineers, each with their own leads. We aim to piece together units, rather than individuals, to create a feature team. This allows for redundancy of each function within a feature team, as well as for code reviews, technical strategy, and execution flexibility to occur on a hyper-local level.
Despite best intentions, decision-making power seems to concentrate around the people manager - not necessarily the domain expert or the person tasked with a given responsibility. We seek to change that by empowering based on criteria other than the number of reports.
Between our adoption of servant leadership and our individual-contributor career tracks, we are committed to changing the traditional corporate power dynamic. Being given the responsibility but not the authority is an anti-pattern we seek to avoid. As a result, we push as much authority and responsibility to the edges as possible.
We are ardent believers in not only servant leadership, but in leadership coming in many forms. To that end, we’ve identified three types of leadership roles that are “decorators” or “hats” that any individual within a unit can take on. These additional leadership roles are meant to be a tax on individual contributor duties, not an outright replacement.