Tribe

Run several small autonomous teams and each one moves fast while the space between them builds the same thing twice. Let the team on payments and the team on subscriptions each write their own price calculation and six months later the same rule exists in two copies, so changing a discount policy means changing two places. Change one and different screens show different amounts.

Patching it with a management layer on top removes the autonomy. Once teams start asking upward about what they used to settle themselves, the reason they moved fast is gone.

So a unit appeared that groups only the related teams and hands them one area. It shrinks the set of people you have to coordinate with from the whole company to a few teams in the same area.

The grouping follows a user journey or an area rather than an org chart. Payments, subscriptions, and billing in one group — teams that collide with each other frequently have to be inside the same one for the unit to be worth anything.

1. Size it at five to eight squads, or forty to a hundred people. Past a hundred, nobody inside knows who is doing what, and it gets split again. The ceiling comes from how many people can hold each other in mind.
2. Give it one lead. That seat sets the area's direction and allocates people and budget; it doesn't decide what gets built or how inside any squad.
3. Three things actually happen inside it: removing what's being built twice in the same area, aligning priorities between squads, and sharing technical standards.
4. Growth and craft standards aren't this unit's job. A chapter, which groups people horizontally by discipline, owns that — so one person works in a squad and learns in a chapter.
5. A guild, formed around an interest, crosses the whole company regardless of these boundaries.

The moment this unit becomes necessary is when squads pass five and duplication in one area has actually surfaced. At three squads, it puts a layer around something three leads could say to each other directly.

"Put payments and subscriptions in the same tribe. We have two price calculations right now."

Making the case for the grouping from the duplication.

"That's a squad decision. We don't settle it at tribe level."

Holding the decision boundary.

"We're past a hundred. This has to split in two."

Applying the size ceiling.

Pagedeck never created this unit. With 45 people and three squads, Grace looked at a proposal to divide the organization and dropped it. Three leads meeting for 30 minutes a week was enough, and adding a layer would have turned those 30 minutes into three meetings.

What got built instead was only the channel where duplication surfaces. The three squads agreed to maintain one shared technical standards document, and to write any new shared logic into that document before building it.