Organizational Design: Handoffs

Good morning. I want to talk today about organizational design, specifically interdepartmental and interpersonal handoffs. So, uh, back in the day, I used to run the 4x400 meters, and the one thing you learned very quickly, aside from the fact that you're running a quarter mile in a dead sprint, which is insane— uh, there's a lot of parallels there to businesses and high-growth startups— but The thing you learn is about handoffs. So as you're running and you're about to hand that baton off to the next person who's behind you, you need a very specific motion in order to make sure that you don't lose any speed as you do that handoff and you get out of the way and that person sprints on by you. You have to do that a few different times in order to successfully win the race. At scale, especially with high-growth startups and even large enterprise businesses, this becomes very critical. I mean, just imagine the amount of handoffs between individuals, not just like Zoom calls, but sending files back and forth, Slack messages back and forth. So if you don't have a really well-defined process and organizational structure for Defining how those handoffs are done, and especially with things like reviews— reviews are a big part of this process, um, for letting people get early access to something, provide feedback, making some edits and iterations, and doing that in rapid real time at scale— you could slow down to a halt. I mean, we at the firm here have been in situations and talked to other folks in situations where Even the biggest tech companies in the world that you would expect to be best in class fall down where even product people don't know what other product people are doing. In fact, like the product team doesn't even know what their product does on launch date and can't communicate that to the PR team. So things like this just become exacerbated the more people you get involved. I mean, think about the exponential level of connections. that have to take place as you increase the team size from 1 person to 2 people to 3 people to 4 people. The number of connections between those grows exponentially as you add more people to a team, which is why keeping small teams and operating as nimble startups, even within larger organizations, means that you can keep the agility and decision speed and reduce handoff complexity. between all of these people. Because at the end of the day, people can sit on a Zoom call, can chat and hypothesize all they want, but until you put something into the market and see whether or not customers and individuals adopt it, even machines, right, like APIs adopt what you have, it's all speculation. So this notion of organizational design and handoffs becomes very, very important Both the size of the teams that you build, how the teams are structured. Are you department by department? Are you like general manager aspect, like around a specific product where each product has its own team, let's say design, engineering, brand, etc.? Or is it shared services? And so this becomes very important in terms of how you go to market because the cadence at which you can iterate is essentially a leading indicator to whether or not you will be competitive and successful in a competitive market, which most are, unless you've invented something new. Okay. That's some high-level thoughts from me today. Happy Monday. Have a great week, everybody. And, uh, we'll see you on the internet. Bye.