Large organisations with a centralised decision-making structure tend to be tad-bit slower than their more nimble, ‘agile-practicing’ startups and businesses.
The latter is able to bypass copious amounts of red tape, make decisions much quicker, and can take their offerings to the market at blazing speeds.
Hence, large organisations are left with one of two choices – Adapt or Get Left Behind.
The logical decision would be to adapt an agile methodology, and speed things up too. However, it isn’t entirely straightforward when you’re a large organisation.
Here’s why. Larger organisations tend to have more vested interests, more on-going projects, more people to manage, larger budgets, and to tie it all together, a higher need for accountability.
An agile methodology at its core may not be able to address all these concerns coherently.
And that’s where they can opt for something like a Matrix Organisational Model. Sounds fancy?
Not really. It’s rather much simpler.
In a Matrix Organisation Model, employees in a team don’t just report to one single boss. They may have a primary manager they report to as well as one or more project managers they work under.
High-growth companies, like the audio streaming giant Spotify and global coffee chain Starbucks, have leveraged the matrix organizational model to grab market share and build customer loyalty within a very short time.
The Matrix Organisational Model – The Spotify way
Spotify’s engineering team have taken the matrix organizational model a step further, restructured it based on their internal needs, and they’re now able to effectively and quickly deliver cool products and features straight to their users.
Here’s how Spotify organises its highly organic and agile-centric matrix model:
Squads: Like project or product teams, a squad consists of six to twelve individuals led by a project leader or agile coach. Squads can use any agile methodology they choose and are focused on developing a single product feature or service.
Tribes: Squads that are aligned and working toward improving a single feature area often form naturally into tribes. Boasting anywhere between 50 to 150 individuals, the purpose of a tribe is to build alignment and collaboration of development work.
Chapter: To enforce engineering standards over their discipline, specialists like JavaScript devs eventually organize themselves into Chapters. Chapters have a broad remit over the quality of work their members output and are often led by a senior technology lead.
Guilds: Unlike Chapters, which are constrained to specialists, Guilds consist of members sharing a common interest or passion. Smart organizations tap into Guilds to build culture, disseminate knowledge, or establish best practices that subsequently benefit project teams.
By adopting such a structure, Spotify’s engineering team has been able to:
- Minimise dependencies
- Minimise unnecessary processes
- Enhance velocity
- Enhance clarity and transparency
You can take this very approach and make it your own as well to reap similar benefits.
Stepping Into The Matrix
Notice how employees from different departments are organized into specific project or product teams, with two reporting lines?
Compared to functional or divisional organizations that maintain one or two siloed department teams that contribute toward a larger project in staggered stages, matrix organizations break down traditional department barriers and assign employees to project or product teams where they can contribute the most, based on their skills and capabilities.
This project or product-oriented emphasis allows decisions and priorities to be made by project teams and their members – not by heads of departments – eliminating bottlenecks and the general lack of visibility that has often hampered progress in more traditional organizational structures.
This structure is great when skills need to be shared across departments to complete a task. It also helps companies tap into a more varied range of talents, skills, and strengths.
Plus, it comes with a few more advantages:
- Projects progress in parallel with dedicated resources and attention, instead of competing with one another within a department
- Project or product teams with deep knowledge on the scope of work call the shots, not a department leader with little visibility of what’s needed
- Traditional department silos are removed, as employees are organized according to project/product groups and not department groups
The key to making those business wins possible lies within how you organise your project teams within a typical matrix model.
Attracting today’s top talents with the matrix organizational model
The flexibility and autonomy provided by the matrix organizational model to project teams and individual employees is also great for remote work or hybrid work arrangements.
Your employees would be interacting (and bonding) with different stakeholders, all the while doing impactful work. This is a great combination to keep large teams engaged, focused, and effective in a post-COVID, remote era.
Furthermore, creatives and creators like developers, growth hack marketers, and project managers have historically shunned rigid organizations in favour of more agile ones, and that preference is only set to intensify further.
When your organization adopts the matrix model, it doesn’t just show a commitment to more agile and flexible ways of work. It demonstrates an emphasis on measurable individual performance – because employees will be evaluated on their quality of work on a specific project, product, or feature, rather than a broad list of requirement boxes they must tick in a traditional JD.
This focus would allow your top talent to hone specific parts of their skill sets over time, while enabling your project leaders to reward them according to their feats of quality work, or their journey down a well-defined progression track.
Taken together, it’s easy to see why the matrix model is a viable organizational structure for organizations looking to scale successfully in this current climate.
Rapid development of products and services, organization-wide collaboration and alignment, and desirable work environments for today’s top talents – all wins that today’s business can realize, if they are daring enough to give the matrix organizational model a try.
