Organizational Design

---
name: organizational-design
description: Structure teams, ownership, and decision rights so work flows rather than queueing at handoffs. Use when coordination cost is rising faster than headcount.
---

# Organizational design

Structure determines what is easy and what is hard. Teams organised
around functions make cross-functional work expensive; teams organised
around outcomes make shared infrastructure hard. Every structure trades
one coordination problem for another.

## Method

1. **Organise around the work that must move fastest.** Whatever the
   business needs to iterate on quickly should sit inside one team with
   the capability to ship it.
2. **Minimise handoffs on the critical path.** Every boundary crossed is
   a queue, and the number of teams a change must pass through predicts
   delivery time better than headcount does.
3. **Make ownership explicit and singular.** Every system, decision, and
   customer commitment has one owning team, since shared ownership is
   unowned (see agent-role-definition).
4. **Match decision rights to information.** Decisions should be made
   where the context is, with escalation for genuine cross-cutting
   trade-offs (see agent-escalation-ladder).
5. **Keep teams small enough to coordinate internally.** Communication
   cost grows faster than team size, and beyond a threshold a team
   becomes two.
6. **Expect the structure to shape the product.** Systems mirror the
   organisation that built them, so a structure at odds with the desired
   architecture will lose.
7. **Reorganise sparingly and explain why.** Every restructure costs
   months of productivity and trust, so it needs a problem worth that
   price.

## Boundaries

Structure enables; it does not substitute for capable people or clear
strategy. Reorganisations are disruptive and often solve a problem that
was cultural. People's roles and livelihoods are involved, which makes
this consequential beyond efficiency (see agent-people-ops-desk).