Organizational Redesign for a Division of 1,000 Engineers

In this solo episode on November 5 at 10:00 a.m. Moscow time, I'll talk about how my remit grew from around 600 to more than 1,000 people and how we divided it into five units. How do you draw boundaries between areas, find CTOs, and gradually hand over decisions, teams, and budgets?

I'll draw on my own experience to cover:
– Why interfaces, platforms, and digital ecosystems needed different management structures.
– How we selected leaders: three promotions and two moves within the company.
– How we brought the new CTOs up to speed and reduced my involvement.
– When it made sense to step into difficult questions and how to preserve leaders' autonomy.
– What we handed over by the end of 2024 and what I'd work through more carefully in the next redesign.

I'll also discuss the difference between delegating authority and retaining ultimate accountability. Even when the new CTOs had almost full autonomy, I remained accountable for the units as a whole.

The slides for this episode and my earlier talk on organizational change from YaTalks 2023 are available on the site. I decided to record this episode as part of working on “Code of Leadership: How to Lead Engineers by Example When Agents Write the Code,” the book idea I wrote about earlier.

#Leadership #Engineering #Management #Software #Productivity #Processes