Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on How Heirloom Tomatoes Should Inspire Team Design
Organizational design, for the most part, is a dry topic. The mere mention of the subject conjures up images of neatly organized two-dimensional tree diagrams, dividing into different branches and reporting lines, making it all-too-easy for eyes to glaze over. That’s why it’s no surprise that even as a startup begins to scale, team structure isn’t always approached with the intentionality and first principles thinking as other parts of company building. Nan Yu wants to change that.
Now Head of Product at Linear, Yu has spent his career building startups in various different stages and industries, from heading up the technology org as CTO at Everlane to scaling product-market fit at the business intelligence tool Mode. In between his last two roles before Linear, Yu took something of a startup “gap year,” teaming up with early to mid-stage companies in Silicon Valley and advising founders. “But as much as anything I was there to learn,” Yu says. “I wanted to see how people were solving problems, what elements of company building they were taking for granted.”
By the end of his advising stint, Yu had seen quite a lot of variance in tech stacks, go-to-market approaches, and fundraising strategies. But what remained unchanged at nearly every startup he visited was team structure, especially in the product org.
