What Org Design means for a manager

You might have heard of the term 'org design' before. Maybe you heard it from consultants. Maybe you heard it from HR folks. It sounds fancy - a legit term that carries with it theories and methodologies.

I'm here to dispel that. There isn't anything amazing or crazy about org design, and as a manager this isn't something you outsource to your HR team or to consultants. Org design is something you naturally run up against when your organization scales, and when you think about how to scale yourself.

At the heart of it, org design is really a fancy way of saying: how do I best structure my team(s)?

Within that question, there are some more. Org design is simply a matter of working through these questions and arriving at the ideal design/solution for how to organize around your team's mission and goals.

1. What types of work, products, or services are within our mandate?
2. How might we organize our team(s) for the right level of autonomy, ownership, and impact?
3. Who is responsible for what? What are the levels of accountability?
4. What are the differences between team leads, managers, directors, and executives? Do we need all those layers right now?

The key thing here is understanding what you want/have right now, and thinking about the future. One's org design is fluid – it should change over time as the org grows and reaches differing stages of maturity. The org design you have right now might be perfect for your department/organization's stage of maturity. Now consider what happens if your department/organization doubles in size. What breaks when it comes to how your teams are structured?