killing hierarchy 2: successful organization design

What are your organization’s values?

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Killing Hierarchy:

Organization Design for Startups

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Agenda

• Architecture– Grouping alternatives

• Operational Processes– Connecting roles

• AEIOU/Roles and Authorization• Evaluation checklist• Connection to culture, mission,

vision, values, strategy

CEO

COO

CFO

VP Fin

Dir

Team Lead

CTO

VP Eng

Dir

Team Lead

CMO

VP Marketin

g

Dir

Team Lead

50y20y10y5y2y1y3m10d

CEO

COO

CFO

Fin1 Fin2 Fin3

CTO

Eng 1

Eng 2

Eng 3

CMO

Mar 1

Mar 2

Mar 3

CEO

AdWords Drive

Document Storage/Retriev

al

Document Creator Spreadsheet

Search YouTube

CEO

Europe Americas

North America Central America South America

Asia Africa

President

Direct to Consumer Enterprise

Sales Business Development Engineering

SMB Non-Prof

CEO

Design Sales Engineering

Norway

USA

Germany

Functional

Presidents

CountryPresident

s

Product Engineering Design Marketing Sales Support

Engineering

SupportSales

Marketing Product

Design

Prod Team

Systems Engineering

Design Business Data Board

Organization focused process

Learn and share

Product team

Design

Front end dev

Data

Status

Systems

All hands meetings

Developmental meetings

Marketing

PR

Cust spprtOffice mgmt

Team meet

Team meet

Team meet

Team meet

Team meet

Team meet

Team meet

Boundary management

Peer bonus

Project management

Back end dev

Integrations Integrations

Prod Team

Systems Engineering

Design Business Data Board

Product focused process

PR and Marketing (x3 in parallel)

Project proposal

Post the project on TrelloRoadma

p

Server Maint

Debugging (x3 in parallel)

Cust Support

Scoping

Team assign

Development (x3 in parallel)

Testing (x3 in parallel)Push to Prod (sequential)

Scoping

Cust Support

Cust feedbck

Other Stuff Done Off Roadmap (technical debt, bug fixes, small enhancements)

Demo Day

Organizational Capability

Highly Important

Nice to Have Not as Important

Product

Operations

Customer

Innovation

Organizational Imperative

Great Fit Good Fit Poor Fit

Culture

Mission

Strategy

Operations

Employee engagement

Information flow

Decision making

Cost

Politics

Hiring and Org Design

• Question!

Hiring and Org Design

• Attraction• Selection• Attrition

Culture

• Be clear about culture and hire to your culture– Culture is not ping pong tables and t-shirts– Culture is made up of values that reflect deep

assumptions and manifest in artifacts like ping pong tables and t-shirts

– If you assume business success comes from innovation and creativity comes from free thinking and thus value autonomy, hire people who can work autonomously

– If you assume business success comes from operational excellence, and excellence comes from coherence and discipline, hire people who thrive in structured environments

What Works in Practice?

• Question!

What works in practice?

• The models are good ways to organize your thinking

• They are not normative for the most part• All of this really has to be fitted for your

organizations culture• This is hard work and there is no one

right way• You are going to get it wrong• Build, measure, learn