Starting the summer of 2019, I spearheaded an effort to evolve our 15 person team into a “department of teams”. At the time, our designer, all of our developers, and analysts reported directly to me. Our team was a “well oiled machine” and worked together very effectively, however I could not in good conscious hire “even one more” direct report.
In order to enable Kindful’s continued growth, we needed to lower the “manager to direct report” ratio. Doing so would provide more support for team members through more access to a manager. Furthermore, it would allow us to increase our rate of hiring and onboarding new team members.
When I think back to that time, it felt like being on the precipice of a daunting challenge. Every single person’s daily work life would be changed in the coming evolution. It has been said that a person’s manager can “make or break” an employee’s daily work life. I felt personally invested in my team and their careers. The very last thing I wanted to do was to hire “the wrong” manager, so I approached this task thoughtfully and delicately. My intention was to aggressively protect the progress we have made over the years in building a well-functioning product development team, while also adding new and complementary people and skill sets.
First, I needed to create a vision for the department that I could convey to job candidates.
To create the vision for our evolved department, I started with the status quo. I thought carefully about “who we are”: about each team member, their skills and their aspirations for career growth. Then I dove deep into “the work”: ‘what do we do on a daily basis today?’ and ‘what are our near term plans?’ I considered our products and modules. Our entire team was supporting all of our products: a CRM, multiple online fundraising tools, an API, a partner portal used by API developers, and a portal used by donor users to manage their online giving. I started writing products and their modules / features on colorful post-its and dreamed of a world where dedicated teams could focus on a specific product and it’s users. Thinking about this future, I considered our talent and experience gaps. I knew we needed managers, but what other skills do we need to hire for? These were my puzzle pieces: existing team members, potential new team members, and the products/modules. I played with the puzzle pieces (modeling with stickies, then moving to Google Sheets – my “digital sketchbook” of choice) until I had a vision of a department structure that I believed could grow with us for the next couple of years.
An evolution this large can’t be done unilaterally. So before I could talk to candidates, I needed to socialize my vision with key internal stakeholders, starting with other leaders in the C Suite, then members of my team. Once I had buy-in from the leadership team, I started to socialize the vision with members of my team, starting with those who I thought would be interested in a manager role. Now that we all shared a vision for the future, my role was to continue to evangelize it. Through conversations with internal team members I ensured that any concerns anyone might have had were carefully considered while also generating excitement about our future opportunities. Having many one on one conversations allowed everyone to feel like they participated in the process. This evolution became something that we were building together.
At this point I was able to go “full speed ahead”, recruiting 2 internal team members for manager roles. And through a collaborative recruiting process, I secured the remaining managers that I needed.
And with the managers secured, I again began talks with each team member, this time about what team they were to be on, who their new manager would be, and what products and modules their team would be focused on. These conversations had the potential to be difficult, however they went quite well. I think we can attribute it to our culture of collaboration, open communication and respect, the cooperativeness of our team members and the conversations I had with everyone along the way.
At this point, I did a bit of a “phased” roll out of the new teams. While team members finished their work in progress, I worked closely with the managers to prepare to actively lead their new teams. I asked them to start meeting with their teams, reporting on progress, and to set up one on ones while I also drove the goal setting and product roadmaps for the next quarter. I modified our Jira configuration to work with our new structure and modified our “ceremonies” to allow for the additional complexity in our department structure. I created a weekly reporting process so that managers could report up to me, so that I could in turn would have what I need in order to continue to report to the rest of senior staff.
In summary, 6 months after my initial sticky note puzzling, we had 4 managers (5 including myself) for the 20 of us. We had 3 scrum teams, each dedicated to specific products/modules. We were in a position to be able to benefit from reduced context switching, increased focus and specialization. We now have established processes, routines, norms, and tooling for a department of teams such that we were well positioned for future challenges such as continued growth and employee turnover. We were able to hire more employees at an increased rate.
What I feel most proud about is the fact that our team has thrived through the transition. I solicited feedback and never received a complaint during the process of assigning people to new managers, to giving people new roles, and changing our processes. Quite the opposite, several people vocalized very positive feedback throughout the process. And in our quarterly review process, I consistently hear glowing reviews of the managers and the positive impact they make on our team member’s experience.