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Structuring your Engineering Organization
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From a couple of founders, to a small team, to being a “small startup”, moving into scale-up territory, and finally transitioning beyond, there are many changes your organization will go through.
But what should you aim for as you grow and need to delegate your responsibilities and you transition from a couple of founders, into a company of 300 or more?
Throughout my career I’ve seen many structures at different scales, and have thought a lot about the ideal structure I would land on for a Engineering company that develops Products (e.g. a SaaS company).
I’ll warn you though: This will be opinionated, but I do believe that there is a strong reasoning behind the structure I’ve ended up at — let’s dive in!
- Ideal Structure
∘ CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
∘ CFO (Chief Financial Officer)
∘ CCO (Chief Commercial Officer)
∘ CTO/CTPO (Chief Technology Officer/Chief Technology & Product Officer) - What are we optimizing for?
- Keeping a growing hierarchy flat
- Summary
- Further Reading
Ideal Structure
Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the high-level overview of the structure, before I give a few more details on why we’ve ended up here:
There will both be familiar aspects to this structure, as well as a few points that might make you tilt your head — let’s take it from the top!
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
The CEO is the place where all decisions ultimately stop, thus all reporting chains should end there.
Each CEO in a company will look different, bringing in unique experience. Some may have run companies at the same scale before, but for many its probably their first time getting to this size.
It’s important that the CEO learns quickly how to delegate the things they are not good at, to people with specialized expertise in the area.
That said, that’s not equivalent to not needing to know about these areas. As the CEO, you should be able to have deep conversations in all the…
