10. Organization

Our Organization is flexible and scalable.

We’re building the best mobility tech company. That includes …

• … creating space to awesome with strong opportunities for personal development.

• … being able to easily scale up and establish teams when necessary.

This is how we organize reporting to get there.

• Our starting point is a matrix model with functional reporting and feature-focused collocation (🌏 popularized by Spotify and described in the medium post 🌏 agile Team Organisation: Squads, Chapters, Tribes and Guilds).

• A pure matrix model is best suited for mature teams with a lot of organizational coaching capacity available to them.

• A traditional tree hierarchy is easy to understand but has some key disadvantages.

  • Engineers report to managers with a different stack (e.g. mobile or QA engineers reporting to a team lead with backend background).

  • Our focus on impact comes with the risk of neglecting personal development. Functional reporting in chapters mitigates that risk.

  • Our focus on speed & flexibility and trust as a core value comes with the risk of detecting problems late. The matrix structure makes it necessary to talk about conflicts and lack of clarity. That way pain can’t go unnoticed for too long.

• Maintaining consistency for multiple product verticals requires either process overhead or a smart reporting structure.

• We combine elements from both structures (tree reporting, matrix model).

  • Engineers report to Chapter Leads to …

    • strengthen personal development.

    • Improve cross-squad interaction.

  • One of the engineers in every squad is Squad Lead (or Squad Speaker) …

    • allowing quick interactions with Squads.

    • being a delivery-focused counterpart to the squad’s product owner.

    • helping their team day-to-day.

    • who helps the team having a clear direction through facilitation and care, not exercising power.

  • Each vertical has a Head of Engineering who works closely with the Head of Product and the Squad Leads strategy, delivery- and staffing-related topics.

• We’re happy to make exceptions to experiment, learn and improve (people > processes).

• In Miro we documented our 🌏 Product & Eng Structure. This organizational chart shows team members and who’s reporting to whom.

• In our Wiki we documented our 🌏 Engineering Roles alongside responsibilities and key personality attributes.