Squad

When teams are split by discipline, shipping one feature depends on several teams' schedules. Each team is doing all of its own work and the output still barely moves.

Pagedeck hit this at 45 people, with design, frontend and backend each as their own team. One feature Mia picked up waited two weeks for its turn in design, then ten days for its turn in frontend after the mockups arrived. Hands were on it for fewer than ten days and it took seven weeks to ship. Waiting was longer than working, and that was a property of the structure rather than of anyone in it.

Hand one goal to one team and put the disciplines that goal needs inside it. When the person you're waiting on sits in your team, waiting turns into a conversation.

1. The composition is product, design and engineering as a baseline, plus data where the goal needs it. Six to twelve is the accepted size; past twelve, keeping everyone aligned each day becomes a job of its own and the team starts splitting informally anyway.
2. There is one goal, written as a metric — raise the share of new teams that create a document in their first week. Two or more goals turn autonomy into an argument about priority, and the argument gets settled outside the team, which removes the autonomy.
3. The team decides what to build and how. Being able to deploy without outside approval is what makes the structure pay; require a signature elsewhere and the waiting simply relocates. Autonomy works when the goal and the standards come with it, and redrawing the org chart alone changes only the labels.
4. Discipline expertise belongs to a chapter. A squad groups people horizontally around a goal; a chapter groups the same discipline vertically, and one person belongs to both.
5. Related squads sit inside a tribe, and a guild is a voluntary group formed around an interest regardless of discipline.

"The squad can decide this. It isn't a question for anyone outside."

Confirming where the decision lives.

"There's no designer in the squad, so we're waiting for a slot again."

The composition is incomplete, so the waiting survived the reorganisation.

"Three goals isn't a squad, it's a small department."

The one-goal condition isn't being met.

Pagedeck regrouped 45 people into five squads. Mia's had a single goal, activation, and seven people. A feature of comparable size went from seven weeks to twelve days, and what shrank was the waiting rather than the work. Typography and spacing rules started diverging between squads, so the chapters began meeting fortnightly to settle them.