Three Ways to Organize a Company
Spotify, Airbnb, and Zappos take three pretty different approaches to company organization. What I found interesting is that each company basically made a different tradeoff between autonomy, alignment, and control.
Spotify: Spotify’s model is built around small, cross functional squads that work on a specific product area. Squads are grouped into tribes, while chapters and guilds connect people across teams. The squad is the main working unit, and the Product Owner helps prioritize the squad’s work. The team has a lot of autonomy over what and how it builds, while the larger structure helps keep different teams aligned.
Airbnb: Airbnb went in a very different direction. Brian Chesky described moving Airbnb from a business unit structure to a functional organization, with design, marketing, and engineering departments. He also put everything onto one company wide roadmap and made designers equal to product managers, while saying that Airbnb actually got rid of the traditional product management function and combined it with product marketing.
Chesky described himself as the “keeper of the roadmap”, so major product decisions are much more centralized.
Zappos: Zappos has holacracy, where authority is attached to roles rather than traditional managerial positions. Instead of a manager simply deciding what everyone should do, work is organized into circles and roles with specific responsibilities and authority. The goal is to distribute decision-making throughout the organization rather than having everything flow through a traditional hierarchy.
Takeaways: Personally, I’d want to work in Spotify’s structure. I like the idea of having a small team where I actually have ownership over what we’re building, but still having enough structure around the team to keep everyone aligned. Airbnb’s centralized roadmap is interesting, especially because it can make it easier to get an entire company moving in the same direction. Zappos is also interesting because it pushes the idea of distributed authority much further.
