The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

When talking about structure with skeptics, I try to reframe the discussion. Instead of talking about structure, I talk about learning. Instead of talking about process, I talk about transparency.

We don’t set up systems because structure and process have inherent value. We do it because we want to learn from our successes and our mistakes, and to share those successes and encode the lessons we learn from failures in a transparent way. This learning and sharing is how organizations become more stable and more scalable over time.

One of the greatest writings about organizational politics is a piece called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by Jo Freeman. While the article is about early feminist/anarchist collectives, Freeman’s insights apply equally well to startup culture. Pretending to lack structure tends to create hidden power structures resulting from the nature of human communication and the challenges of trying to scale that communication.

In the same way that strong technical systems designers are capable of identifying and shaping underlying system structures, strong leaders are capable of identifying and shaping underlying team structures and dynamics, and doing so in a way that supports the long-term goals of the team and equips the individuals to achieve their best.

In fact, there’s even a law that accounts for this, from John Gall’s book Systemantics:1 A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

at some point you’ll start to experience failure, and failure is the best place to investigate and identify where your structure needs to change.

Using failure to guide evolution lets you apply structure at the right level.

you can learn things from success, but it is often a poor teacher.

When every new hire slows the team down for months because there is no onboarding process, that is a failure due to lack of structure.

The third time you have a production outage because someone logged directly into the database and accidentally dropped a critical table, that is a failure due to lack of structure.

Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it.

But in complex environments where the needs of the group must override the needs of the individual, cultural values are the glue that enables us to work as a team and make decisions when faced with uncertainty.

Use narrow salary bands for early-career stages. Lots of levels and narrow salary bands mean that you can promote people quickly and justify giving them raises while keeping your pay for all people at a certain level close to the same.

Conway’s Law is often cited in discussions of this kind of structure. It states: “Organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

code reviews don’t catch bugs; tests catch bugs.

Code review is largely a socialization exercise, so that multiple team members have seen and are aware of the changed code.

The goal of architecture review is to help socialize big changes to the appropriate group, and to make the risks for those changes clear.