[MrUnknown]

I work at a company that has a "flat" management structure. You probably use a product that has one of our products several times a day and not even know it. While we are not a hardware design company, we do design and manufacture plenty of products you make use of every day. Mostly known for GORE-TEX.

I don't believe the management structure would cause any major issues. Generally a team is created to handle a project, and people not in that team really have no major say in what is going on.

[mst]

Plus, flat management structure doesn't mean flat team structure - when a group of people work on a task at shadowcat, there's generally one person who acts as effective lead for that project, whether we get around to writing it down anywhere or not.

[MrUnknown]

yep!

There are "semi-equivalents" to a traditional structure. Teams have one or more Leaders that make or help make decisions for the rest of the team.

Once you get larger you do run into the case where a team is created that can force decisions upon another team to a certain degree. Such as if IT decides that your password should start containing two numbers instead of one, that decision affects everyone who uses those services. Don't like it? You need to get funding and support to setup your own IT for your team which most likely will not get support.