#org design

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, has advised dozens of startups of all stages and sizes. He unpacks why founders should be suspicious of symmetry in their team structure, and offers a three-part framework on how to optimize for an “heirloom tomato” org chart.

Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once. The central idea is this: We identify the necessary user experience domains for our products We identify the shared product domains that underpin multiple user experience domains We organize engineering into three layers, the top two correspond to the above domains and the third provides infrastructure.

I initially gave this talk at Lead Agile Brighton in October 2022, then updated and refined the slide deck for Agile Manchester in May 2023, so I’ve updated this post too. I've noticed an increasingly worrying trend in the industry of focus on specialisms at the expense of collaboration, shared r