hardCase StudyScenarioStaffLead
You have twenty-five engineers in three teams and almost every feature needs all three of them. You have been asked to re-cut the organisation. How would you do it, and what does the change itself cost?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Big Tech, Enterprise Captive, Product Startup
Answer
Short answer
Measure where the coupling actually is before moving anybody, then cut boundaries around what a team can release without waiting on another. Price the transition honestly, name what your design makes worse, and be willing to say the coupling is architectural and no org chart will fix it.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- Your proposal leaves one team with no manager and another with two. How do you resolve that?
- The three engineers who know the legacy billing code all end up on different teams under your design. What do you do?
- How would you know at six months whether the re-cut worked, without asking people how they feel about it?
- Your director wants this done in two weeks to align with the planning cycle. What do you push back on?
Related questions
- Your managers each have twelve reports and nobody is sure who owns what. Redesign the organisation.hardAlso on org-design and reorganisation6 min
- How do you execute the Inverse Conway Maneuver on a 200-person engineering org that accidentally built a distributed monolith mirroring their dysfunctional silos?hardAlso on org-design and conways-law3 min
- You have inherited a system nobody left behind any knowledge of, and you have two weeks to produce a plan. Walk me through it.hardAlso on ownership6 min
- You must reduce the engineering organisation by fifteen percent. How do you decide, and how do you lead the people who stay?hardAlso on org-design6 min