Running an Engineering Reorg §
Highlights §
- At quickly growing companies, I believe there are two managerial skills that have a disproportionate impact on your organization’s success: making technical migrations cheap, and running clean reorganizations (View Highlight)
- managing organizational change is more general so let’s work through a lightly structured framework for (re)designing an engineering organization. (View Highlight)
- Is the problem structural? The opportunities of organization change are to increase communication, reduce decision friction, and focus attention; if you’re looking for a different change, consider a bit if there’s a more direct approach. (View Highlight)
- Put teams which work together (especially poorly) as close together as possible. This minimizes the distance for escalations during disagreements, allowing arbiters to have sufficient context, but also most poor working relationships are the byproduct of information gaps, and nothing fills them faster than proximity. (View Highlight)
- Can you define clear interfaces for each teams? (View Highlight)
- Can you list the areas of ownership for each team? (View Highlight)
- The final and often times most awkward phase of a reorganization is its rollout. There are three key elements to a good rollout:
- Explanation of reasoning driving the reorganization.
- Documentation of how each person and team will be impacted.
- Availability and empathy to help bleed off frustration from impacted individuals. (View Highlight)