[restlessdesign]

This was before we grew to 200+, but the best snapshot was:

- <80 person team (total); ~60% engineers

- 0 product managers: design and engineering are equally empowered to make the site nice within general business/product definitions defined by GM who would constantly get excited about the work you showed her, making you feel good about yourself and your work

- 0 project managers: business understands that there is no magic formula for delivering products that haven't been built yet and so long as we try our best to hit dates and cut scope as needed, it's on us to track our progress and determine priorities

- gm, cto, and head of hr all supportive of growing team and individual members in a non-political way

- politically-driven employees (typically a head of sales or marketing) shut down and churn out quickly

- engineers talk directly with customer service

- engineers perform rounds helping out in support forums

- domain specialists, but no fences. i might be a web engineer, but if there's a sql query i feel compelled to optimize, nobody is going to stop me.

- company regularly interacts with, and hosts local events for, an engaged user base. engineers actually end up having in person conversations with our users, gathering honest feedback for improvements while simultaneously being told how great the product they contribute to is overall

- relaxed hours ("you're an adult; we trust you to get your work done")

- when dining out or getting drinks, even paying by cash a large group is able to come up with the right amount of money, with no one person needing to chip in more than necessary

- anyone in the company can deploy the site with a single chat room command

[muzani]

I'm very surprised you could have no managers. Personally I always thought it wad good to have a management level person to filter out content from customers or Product.

[aylmao]

One of my most productive sprints I ever had at a job was after a couple months working on an internal tool that was going nowhere. After being frustrated for a long time with a project's management, I cut the middle-man and went directly to the customer, did my own user research, brainstormed either on my own or independently with others, and kept direct contact with the users to keep a tight feedback loop when shipping features.

Management and middlemen can as much help velocity as they can hurt it. More hands doesn't always mean faster work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Aeolun]

I think the problem is the middlemen feel compelled to add value somehow, since otherwise people would figure out that their job is pointless.

[shandor]

The adage "good leaders make themselves unnecessary" applies.

If you have people under you, or can coach your people to take parts of your responsibilities off you, I think that's a great outcome. If your ICs are so good that they can actually do that, you should give them a raise and be glad you get to focus on other things in the meanwhile.

Of course, if the manager is unable to then broader their own scope, they indeed become disposable.

[Aeolun]

Oh certainly. There are a lot of managers that add value. I was talking more about the 5 layers of confusion (product manager, project manager, business manager, business architect, designer) that exist between our customer and the developers. There may be more that I haven’t yet discovered.

We recently spent quite a while on developing a feature only to find out the customer didn’t actually want it.

[shandor]

Ouch. Sounds like your product manager and business manager are indeed not doing much more than warming their seats :)