Organizational Design for Product and Engineering

"For example, at Airbnb we had a team oriented around the outcome of getting hosts more bookings, NOT a team owning the “host products” that then figured out how to drive bookings. Similarly, we had a team focused on the outcome of improving trip quality, NOT a team owning the “reviews product” that then figured out how to drive up quality."

"Do you organize teams around a goal, or around product/surface areas? Are teams encouraged to work on any part of the product to achieve their goals, or are they pushed to stay within their lanes? Do teams build a strategy and roadmap rooted in business goal, or rooted in making the products/features they own more successful?"

"Heads of growth most commonly report to product leaders, but sometimes they may roll up into sales/GTM organizations to better align incentives and KPIs. Sometimes you may see a head of growth reporting to a CRO, or head of GTM. In this setup, the head of growth acts more like a general manager (GM) for the self-service product line."

"Data scientists were not just 'consulted' on product, but data itself became critical to decision-making. Data scientists sat next to PMs and along with the engineers and designers were a critical voice in roadmap planning. I find the strongest teams operate with data at the outset – they don't just call over the data scientist when it's time to do a post-facto analysis of how XYZ experiment went."

"The closer your North Star metric is to revenue, the more suited your organization is to a GM model."

"In practice, most companies operate in a hybrid model but skew toward the GM or functional mode. Depending on what is needed for specific products and teams to succeed, some parts of the company are GM-led, with P&L accountability, and some are function-led, with product success metrics."

"In GM organizations, leaders with depth of expertise in one specific domain are crucial, because they are responsible for the success of their business area alone."

"Functional models optimize for product growth through cohesive customer journeys. This is especially critical for growth-stage companies. When the customer journey is seamless, organic flywheels emerge."

"The team is managed by two or three “co-leads.” Typically, a PM lead and an Engineering lead head up the team, sometimes joined by a Learning and Curriculum lead (experts in learning science, curriculum design, and educational content creation), Biz Ops lead, or Marketing lead, depending on what the team is working on."

"While all of our teams are metrics-driven, we tend to structure product teams as either (1) metric-based or (2) feature-based. Metric-based teams are structured around clear metrics that impact something the company wants to improve, like revenue or DAUs."

"Right now, we organize around products and platforms. We have two products—Figma Design and FigJam—so we have two teams solely focused on the respective product. We then have “horizontal” platform teams that build features and solve problems across both products, e.g. the “Enterprise” group that focuses on making both of these products amazing for large enterprises and the “Infrastructure” group that ensures the reliability and performance of both products."

"Very intentionally, all people report up through a professional chain. That is, all product designers report to the head of product design (who reports to me), all analysts report to the head of analytics (who reports to me), and so on."

"Instead of having a PM for every team or area of the product, we like to see that the broader team collectively thinks about the product and how features are delivered, not just the PMs."

"We have purposely avoided product-area-specific teams (e.g. the roadmaps product team, the cycles product team, etc.), as I see it can be a way for people to get too trapped in their specific product area and potentially lose the broader context and/or start working on more minor details with diminishing returns."

"Product and design report to me (CEO). We have engineering managers, but engineering ultimately reports up to my co-founders: Tuomas for infrastructure and Europe engineering, and Jori for U.S. engineering. While engineering and design have their own meetings for their functions, for the most part, we talk about “Product” holistically and not engineering, design, and product separately."

"Today the product organization is a cross-functional team composed of Analytics, (Product) Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Design—or AMPED for short. AMPED is organized into seven 'product streams' aligned to the product component that each stream owns"

"You can’t decompose Notion into individual products. So if you’re working on the Project Management offering at Notion and you change how databases work, or you change how pages work, that has implications for the use of Notion as a docs tool or a wiki tool. So there is a bit more of this central planning and product coordination problem here to make sure that things are considered holistically and that people aren’t stepping over each other in a way that makes the product worse."

"We didn’t have PMs until two years ago, at around 50 or 60 engineers. I’m not sure this was actually ideal. ... That said, there is a difference between engineers who think about product, and product managers who are out there talking to users and bringing in user feedback constantly, coordinating closely with go-to-market teams, and thinking deeply about product strategy."

"We have a unified product and technology organization—engineering, product management, design, data, user research, and security all roll up to me. Our data lead, design lead, research lead, engineering and product management group leads, user research lead, plus the person working on our overall technical approach and our CISO—they’re all peers and my directs, and we frequently meet and plan together."

"My goal is to structure teams around minimizing ‘coordination headwind,’ as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things."

"Everyone should report to the same tech-minded leader. There is no better way to force a relationship to happen than by having each head report into the same leader—in our case, we all report into the CTO."

"The best companies figure out how to make sure you can’t see the org chart through the product."

"Teams at Snowflake are organized more around customer workloads (various programs or applications running in the Data Cloud), rather than specific features or feature areas."

"Product brings the context of the problem we're solving and why it matters. Together with Design and Eng, a range of solutions are explored. Eng provides options that are feasible (based on whatever constraints), Design owns the experience of that solution."

"John’s original post lists 12 ways to know you’re in a feature factory, which I boil down to rewarding outputs over outcomes. Feature-factory teams are praised for shipping many features but not for achieving specific goals or moving important metrics."

"Where our thinking diverges is that I see the feature factory as the right choice for some CEOs to run their companies, especially when those CEOs have a clear and compelling product vision."

"Form cross-functional teams, with all of the resources necessary to ship, and empower them to drive outcomes."

"Two-thirds of companies have both an IC track and a manager track. When there’s a manager track, you can switch at L6 (i.e. Sr. Product Manager)"

"Most common attributes/competencies/skills (in order): 1. Leadership 2. Impact 3. Scope 4. Execution 5. Communication 6. Vision 7. Strategy 8. Collaboration 9. Planning 10. Technical skills"

"Four companies (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft, and Facebook) try to avoid title inflation and stick to “Product Manager” for the majority of IC levels. Stripe officially sticks to the “Product Manager” title at every level."

"Optimize for dedicated cross-functional teams with a clear mandate. In my experience, this is the single most impactful thing leaders can do when setting up a team. You want self-contained teams that can move autonomously toward an agreed-upon goal."