Strategy and structure must dance together

Companies that are very high performing have coherence between the structure of their company and their current strategy...Their funding approach, their incentives, the org structure, the architecture, even their technical architecture supports their strategy.

Conway's Law can be really, really powerful. So it's the law that basically says you ship your org structure. So what you're organized as in terms of teams, in terms of collaborating groups and your operating model matters a lot to what you build.

All engineers report into one single team now, all designers report into one single team and there's single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera. And so that was the big transformation that we made, and that meant we could really drive forward AI, we could drive forward platform and just technical depth generally.

We're being more thoughtful about it. In the GM structure, our incentives were always to think of engineering headcount as a commodity. And so we would just add more engineers if we wanted to build more features and the classic mythical man person month trap. Moving to a functional structure completely changes that.

Even if you want to have innovation, even if you really do crave it, you're willing to take the risk, if you don't set up the organization in the right way, you're just not going to get it.

No individual person can ever make promises on behalf of an organization, it's not possible, it's a category error. You're replaceable. If you want your organization to be trustworthy, you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself.