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Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on Designing Your Team

review.firstround.com · 4,097 words · saved by 1 readers

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, has advised dozens of startups of all stages and sizes. He unpacks why founders should be suspicious of symmetry in their team structure, and offers a three-part framework on how to optimize for an “heirloom tomato” org chart. Join the 200K+ other builders who subscribe to our free newsletter. Organizational design, for the most part, is a dry topic. The mere mention of the subject conjures up images of neatly organized two-dimensional tree diagrams, dividing into different branches and reporting lines, making it all-too-easy for eyes to glaze over. That’s why it’s no surprise that even as a startup begins to scale, team structure isn’t always approached with the intentionality and first principles thinking as other parts of company building. Nan Yu wants to change that. Now Head of Product at Linear, Yu has spent his career building startups in various different stages and industries, from heading up the technology org as CTO at Everlane to scaling p

Organizational design, for the most part, is a dry topic. The mere mention of the subject conjures up images of neatly organized two-dimensional tree diagrams, dividing into different branches and reporting lines, making it all-too-easy for eyes to glaze over. That’s why it’s no surprise that even as a startup begins to scale, team structure isn’t always approached with the intentionality and first principles thinking as other parts of company building. Nan Yu wants to change that. Now Head of Product at Linear, Yu has spent his career building startups in various different stages and industri

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