We put a horizontal team through a silo’d org structure with great success. The team is Release Engineering in all but name and we used the project of “make re

We put a horizontal team through a silo’d org structure with great success. The team is Release Engineering in all but name and we used the project of “make releases faster” to send a shock wave back up the org in order to bring a once-deliberately segregated product / org structure much closer together. The goal was to do so in the name of speed and flexibility. As with any shock wave, the healing energy dissipated the further it travelled. We don’t expect to be able to effect complete removal of product silos all the way up one end of the org by applying change from the release process from all the way at the other end. However, the wave propagated quite a long way. We only have 10^1.9 engineers which helped make the changes tractable and was also the basis for wanting to move to a much faster org structure. In short, we had a micro teams and microservices structure that would suit a team of 8,000 when in reality there are only 80 of us (series B, 9 digit valuation) so we drilled a hole in the side of the complicated old ship and got everyone into the same life/speedboat instead.