I’m a long-time entrepreneur and current CEO of an enterprise technology firm. Over the past 20 years I've been in the trenches building and scaling 6 startups, and have personally closed over $250M of sales along the way.
One of the key lessons I've learned is that smaller teams with more autonomy innovate faster than top-down hierarchies. I've tested this "small autonomous teams" model across my companies and while consulting for Fortune 500s.
I've been working on my first book for the past 2 years, called "Smaller is Better" and I'm looking to get some feedback from you guys. It's a playbook for structuring small cross-functional teams, empowering them to make decisions, and using techniques like real-time feedback and continuous improvement to move faster.
The book comes out today, and I'm offering free chapters for this community on real-time feedback and radical transparency for anyone who's interested. Just shoot me a response and I'll send it over.
"Respondents shared that they see team and individual awareness and self-discipline as the best ways to help get the overspend under control (68%)"
Another benefit of running small, cross-functional teams. It's a lot more difficult for bloat to become overwhelming when teams have strong autonomy over their own decisions and stacks. Think this will naturally shift down as larger orgs make switch to small, 8-12 person autonomous teams.
> Another benefit of running small, cross-functional teams. It's a lot more difficult for bloat to become overwhelming when teams have strong autonomy over their own decisions and stacks
I’ve found the opposite to be true unless autonomy is paired with accountability. Ultimately the people making decisions need to pay the costs for their choices and I’ve seen that be especially bad where someone had the autonomy to spin up a ton of resources which someone else had to pay for. This can be especially bad if that was resume-driven development where they were playing cloud service bingo trying to list experience with things they really couldn’t have justified based on the application’s actual usage.
autonomy will absolutely lead to bloat if there isn't an accountability mechanism in place.
at my last job as head of eng at a small (15-20 devs), I pushed teams to build their dashboards with business metrics in addition to the usual operational metrics. things like costs, customer frustration signals and support ticket volumes, product metrics, etc would show up there.
integrating these initially is non-trivial, but once the data is flowing, it's easy for teams to pick them up. gives a good sense of ownership, helps teams address these proactively (or build a business case for addressing them), and gives the team+stakeholders a common dataset so everyone has the same complete picture to work from.
Good post. Have found that active listening like this is extremely important within the context of feedback. Both parties need to be active listeners. It's vital for the recipient of feedback to repeat back what the giver is saying to make sure everyone is on the same page. Minor step, but has a massive impact on how feedback is perceived and acted on between parties.
