The org chart decisions you cannot take back
Monogram's engineering team grew from twelve people to two hundred in four years. Noah Whitaker on the structural choices that were easy to change, and the few that were not.
- Wednesday 9 June
- Day 1
- 15:20–16:00
- 40 minutes
- Studio
- First floor, river side
- Talk
- Intermediate
Most decisions in a growing engineering team are cheap to reverse. You can rename a team, change a meeting or rewrite a process. A few are not: how teams map to the product, who owns production, and what the career framework rewards. Get those wrong and you live with them for years, because people have built their jobs around them.
Noah has made all of these decisions at Monogram, several of them twice. He walks through the structure at twelve, fifty, one hundred and two hundred engineers, what broke at each stage, and the warning signs he wishes he had noticed sooner. He is candid about the career framework that accidentally rewarded rewrites and the on-call rota that wore out the platform team.
You will leave with a short list of the decisions that deserve your slowest thinking, and permission to move quickly on the rest.
What you will take away
- How to tell a reversible organisational decision from one that will stick for years
- What changed in Monogram’s team structure at each stage of growth, and why
- Career framework and on-call designs that held up, and two that did not
