Great companies maintain their insurgent mindset, for fear of becoming complacent and irrelevant over time.
Push decision making down to single-threaded DRIs
Single-threaded is tech jargon that simply means solely focused on a single area. The single threaded DRI is the most senior person whose only job is to run a given product or initiative, this will typically be a product management or engineering leader.
Leverage shared services to minimize duplication
Done wrong, shared services can slow down and frustrate product teams. But when they work well, they can create amazing synergies between products, and deeper product integration. Product teams should not be required to use a half baked shared service. But once a shared service is mature, all products may be required to use it.
… When it becomes clear that we are duplicating effort or creating an inconsistent user experience across our products, services need to graduate into clearly decoupled services that any product can leverage.
Organize teams into small pods Small teams are more efficient. … We’re beginning to deploy a new concept that we call “pods” to create more structure around the appropriate size of a team.
Pods also need to have a focus, and a north star metric that ties into the overall company metrics.
Ship products not slide decks
Maintain an insurgent mindset
Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to retaining the founder mentality inside the company and acting like owners.