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I generally think matrixed is death, so I’m always pushing companies to go to a flat structure of independent teams. I’m really on the Jeff Bezos program on that, the two-pizza team thing.2 I think hierarchies kill innovation for the most part. And I think that matrixes are just lethal in most cases. There are exceptions, but in most cases, you nee

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Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more

For example, changing the definition of productivity for a team from functional excellence—excellence in marketing, sales, or product development—to validated learning will cause problems. As was indicated earlier, functional specialists are accustomed to measuring their efficiency by looking at the proportion of time they are busy doing their work

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Necessary chaos embraces the uncertainty inherent to startups. Here are a few examples:

As growth accelerates and larger teams are needed, people stretch into new roles, teams scale and split, and new processes are formed.

After a promising call with a potential new customer, the product roadmap is re-prioritized to incorporate features that will hel... See more