Organizational Structure

Dave Bailey, Co-Founder & Brazil CEO, Delivery Hero

Dave provides a description, common metrics, and common dilemma for each of the standard functional departments at a company: Exec Team, Operations, Technology, Growth, Product, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Finance, & HR.

Steven Sinofsky, Board Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Steven explains two of the most common high-level organization structures: Functional: Each functional department covers all business units (e.g. there is one marketing department for all business units). Business Unit: Each business unit has their own functional teams (e.g. their own marketing team).

Andy Johns, President, Wealthfront

Andy argues that the most common drawback of functional organizations is that they start to over-index on business growth, and aren't designed to provide new and innovative value to customers (as opposed to optimizing the existing value propositions). The solutions are to design product organizations around the needs of the user and to provide explicit guidance on how to balance effort between optimization and innovation by product group.

Claire Hughes Johnson, COO, Stripe

Claire provides steps for how to be intentional about growth when your organization becomes larger: 1. Document your company's "operating principles" 2. Re-evaluate your org structure and recurring meetings as you grow 3. Learn the qualities of your top-performing team members, and reinforce them in your hiring process 4. Provide a simple long-term vision / "5 year plan" to all team members, so they understand where you're trying to get to 5. Quantitatively measure employee experience 6. Empower decentralized decision-making via the "see one, do one, teach one" methodology

Ben Horowitz, Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

Ben shares a story on how separate his CFO and GC in his company's org chart saved him from going to jail. The broader implication is to be thoughtful about the relationship between reporting structure of departments and competing metrics. When one department reports in to another, the more likely it is that the metrics of the lower department will be subservient to the metrics of the higher department.

Joel Podolny, Dean of Apple University, Apple