
I Almost Walked Away from the $500k/Mo Company I Founded - rcarrigan87
https://www.groovehq.com/blog/almost-walked-away
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tynpeddler
I'm always surprised when other people are surprised that flat organizations
don't scale. Honestly, unstructured organizations only work in two situations.
If the teams is 4 or fewer people, or if you have specifically curated a team
of very experienced people whose personalities are exactly correct.

In literally any other situation, an unstructured org is corrosive to domain
expertise, weakens code ownership and responsibility and creates a byzantine,
implicit power structure that breaks down the decision making power of the
organization.

The fetishization of flat orgs was in response to the unwieldy bureaucracies
or large corporations. However the problem with bureaucracy is not the
hierarchy, but the lack of agency in the individual teams. This leaves teams
dis-empowered and unable to act on their core competency, their direct
knowledge of the company's product. Instead, development teams should be well
organized with clearly delineated roles. Most importantly, development teams
should not exist merely to do work, but also to make decisions and take
responsibility for those decisions.

