🥥 Behind org design

The right structure is one of the most important components of a company as it can get you much closer to achieving key goals and results. The structure also helps you to create your own company culture and get more clarity over the company's strategies.

🧱 How to navigate org design conversations and create a good org structure?

To design the right structure for your company, work backwards from your vision for the future to identify what responsibilities and capabilities will become essential.

A helpful practice is to ask leadership team to build the org chart for the next 12 – 14 months. For example, if they’ve already made it through the series A, what is it going to take them to get to the B round and build the org chart for that.

What are the gaps from series A to series B – then you have to plan out the Q1/Q2 hires. Now you can see you have 30 hires you have to make in the new quarter, but you don’t have anyone on the recruiting team, so then you identify that. Put some natural prioritization around that instead of thinking just doubling headcount in the next year. This breaks it up. The finance partner can help put the planning analysis around that.

Whether you find yourself as a VC talent partner or in the operating role - first Head of People at the company you need to help early founding teams with navigating these conversations.

🚩 Red flags to look for

• Key execs are stretched too thin to do their best work.

• Learning is happening too slowly: A common mistake we see companies make is handing out big titles to their earliest hires. Are the majority of employees learning “on the job” with no one to accelerate and guide their development? Is quality suffering? Is your business about to experience a change or growth spurt that will require additional strategy, subject matter expertise, and/or structure-building strengths?

• Avoid silos and create cross-functional connection with a shared vision, transparent information, visibility into one another’s work, and a clear system to give input.

  

🚀 Types of org structure

The majority of organizational structures follow the hierarchical model popularized during the Industrial Revolution. There are new ways of structuring and running your organizations that are trying to replace the org structure and give more autonomy to the individuals.

Organizational structures

🛠 Tools

<aside> 💡 There is a bunch of tools that are worthy to think of implementing early for teams or visualize the org chart. If you want to start simply and for free, I recommend simply drawing it in Google drawing.

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Tools & templates for org charts