Org Design

“single-threaded leadership,” in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect,” the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones. … Jeff’s vision was that we needed to focus on loosely coupled interaction via machines through well-defined APIs rather than via humans through emails and meetings.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

A two-pizza team will:

• Be small. No more than ten people.
• Be autonomous. The should have no need to coordinate with other teams to geth their work done. …
• Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function”. This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics. …⊕ Note that they stopped doing this eventually, “relying directly on the underlying metrics” and agreeing on a “specific goal for each input metric” (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)
  
  
• Be monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores.
• Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results. …
• Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have dep technical expertise, know how to hire world class software engineers and product managers, and posses excellent business judgement.⊕ Note that they gave up on requing such rare leaders, and instead went to a matrix “where each team member would have a solid-line reporting relationship to a functional manager who matched their job description–for example, director of software development or director of product management–and a dotted-line reporting relationship to their two-pizza manager.” (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)
  
  
• Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself.
• Be approved by the S-team.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)
  
  

The Fitness Function alignment meetings … clearly established expectations and confirmed the team’s readiness. Just as importantly, they also built up trust between Jeff and the new team, reinforcing their autonomy – and therefore their velocity.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

The most successful teams invested much of their early time in removing dependencies and building “instrumentation” – our team for infrastructure used to measure every important action – before they began to innovate, meaning, add new features.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

We found it helpful to think of such cross-functional projects as a kind of tax, a payment on team had to make in support of the overall forward progress of the company.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

But we later came to realize that the biggest predictor of a team’s success was not whether it was small but whether it had a leader with the appropriate skills, authority, and experience to staff and manage a team whose sole focus was to get the job done. … [we] chose the computer science term “single threaded,” menaing you only work on one thing at a time. Thus, “single threaded leaders” and “separable, single-threaded teams” were born.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

Separable means almost as separable organizationally as APIs are for software. Single threaded means they don’t work on anything else.⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)

a good rule of thumb to see if a team has sufficient autonomy is deployment–can the team build and roll out their changes without coupling, coordination, and approvals from other teams?⊕ (Bryan and Carr 2021, chap. 3)