AA253 - The Delayering Disaster: Why Cutting Middle Management Is Blowing Up

Meta and Amazon are cutting managers, but is it efficiency or chaos?

Is de-layering, or flattening your org chart, good for a company, or is it a recipe for destruction?

Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel as we wade into the murky pool that is the latest of corporate trends - "un-bossing" or the mass sacrifice of middle management and mid-level coordination roles on the unholy alter of efficiency. 

While the biggest of big companies are slashing layers to reduce costs and empower the IC (individual contributors), we take a more nuanced look, arguing that without proper system redesign, this approach leads to decision bottlenecks, leadership vacuums, and the collapse of career mobility.

Listen or watch as we discuss:
- Why firing coordinators doesn't eliminate the need for coordination
- The dangers of "spreadsheet-driven development" (SDD™)
- How informal hierarchies and politics emerge when formal authority is removed
- The impact of removing middle management on mentorship, sponsorship, and career growth
- How to actually flatten an org, when necessary

We're pulling out all the stops (and the research) as we review Google's failed "no manager" experiment from 2002, revisit the book Team Topologies, and discuss the recent trend towards a Chief of Staff type role. If you are a leader considering a reorg or a developer wondering why your meetings are getting more chaotic, this episode is for you!

#ProductManagement #Leadership #TeamTopologies

Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Google Project Oxygen, Fortune article "Executives are drowning. Blame the vanishing middle management layer" by Lily May Lazarus, Zappos Holacracy, Arguing Agile Episode #67 (Team Topologies), Arguing Agile Episode #250 (AI ROI)

LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Transcript

0:00

So let me get this straight home. Amazon or meta, they fire half of their managers. And what you're going to argue on the podcast today is that was not a mistake. So the mistake really was firing them without fixing the system first. You can tell that to the executives that now have 50 to 60 direct reports like, like friend of the show, Jensen Wang. Oh, dear, dear. He's a friend of the show with his cool, he's, he's just like you and me with his cool leather jacket. Yeah, sure he is, exactly. That a $10 ,000 jacket? You got on there? This is 15, but it's not leather. ,000? No,$15 ,000. No, not quite, but, okay, so I it's not unbossing. That's our phrase is. Yeah, yeah, that's the term you're going to hear a lot today. It's not unbossing. It's chaos. disguised as efficiency, in here quotes. Okay, so the having too few managers. It's too the problem isn't many decisions with no owners or accountability, Now you're onto it. Yeah, you can't flatten something you never designed to scale in the first place. All Uh, welcome back to arguing the agile. If this is your first time, welcome. I'm your host, product manager of Brian Orlando, and this is my co -host, consultant and the business agility ace of the business case, Mr. Oum Patel. Welcome. Welcome on and all. about unbossing, which is a term that's completely made up and you won't find anywhere today's episode is else, but right here on the podcast about, the current trend, which actually has been going on for a long time, the trend of blowing up. middle management like like your wily coyote with the t &T blowing up middle management and then and then thinking you're okay because what does middle management do anyway they just pushing papers around right um that's today so by the end of this episode you'll be informed about what's been happening in the last several years with companies flattening structures uh and you'll be able to spot helpful reorgs versus unbossing theater. That's that's right. Oh, we're talking about real org design and practical advice to keep leadership and your reporting structures and your hierarchy or your company to keep it scalable, not chaotic. So if you can find that anywhere else on the internet, good. solid org design advice. Oh boy, if you can find that for free and not have to like pay somebody $650 for a course on the internet, you should take that deal. Exactly. But you're here, so we'll make it worth you while. Oh, we will. I guarantee it. Or your money back. That you didn't pay. Okay, let's go. Can you really delete middle management and and expect that the work will magically self -organize. Coordination doesn't disappear just because the coordinators disappeared. we, and the work is still there. Yes. Yeah, and I do have to say, like, this is an interesting take. for me to be on the side of because I have spent many, many podcasts up until this point being on the other side of this arguing point to say, oh, let the teams do the coordination work. But as we know, like as, as orgs have scaled back the coordination roles, the scrum masters and, team leads and, the scaled. product folks or the scaled team lead folks or whatever um as orgs have scaled those rolls back The job still has to get done. So who does it? Well, haphazardly, like a bunch of people do it. Or not do it well. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I remember not too long ago, there was a distinct role in project management called a project coordinator. And you haven't heard about that title in a long time. They've disappeared. Yeah. Now, the work, to your point, right, the work hasn't gone away. It's just got absorbed by various other personas in different degrees of, you know what I've seen, you know what I've seen in a lot of, sorry, you know what I've seen in a lot of, a California -based companies, California and New York, that kind of area, like, Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley adjacent companies is I've seen a lot of companies taking on this chief of staff role. And I have to think maybe some of these coordination activities have been absorbed by this chief of staff role. But even that, that's the chief staff is one person. So they can only absorb so much. we'll talk later on the podcast about, a Google initiative that did something similar. But, I, I have seen that. Yeah. Coordination roles by other names. Indeed. Yeah, and that is, that is the reasonably recent trend with that title. I think another one, another title, rather, that goes back a bit is the operations manager. Right. And, you know, when you can't figure out who owns something, it's the ops manager. Typically, that's how it was handled. You know what, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. I think, at a recent event, shout out to B, if you're watching, at a recent event, I was talking to be and we were, that, that's a person, by the way, it doesn't sound like it when I say, I was talking to be, I was talking to be and, she was talking about kind of what she enjoys. And I said, and I, I said, it sounds a lot like a traditional operations role. And by a traditional operations role, I mean, like a very chaotic, this person just kind of grabs things, figures out how to get it done initially. and then writes the playbook of the process after they're done yeah they intercept the chaos deal with it so it doesn't like that you put up the umbrella so it doesn't get everyone wet and then when the job is done and over they kind of write the playbook going forward and that's what i think about operate that's why i think about a good operations like a c o chief of operations yeah when you're a small company You don't really need that full time because every employee is kind of talking to other people saying, hey, I ran into this thing. I don't really know how to deal with it. What should we do? And they kind of talk to each other and they figure out the playbook between the, the few of them. When you grow to like 30 people, you can't really do that anymore. you need to start like segmenting jobs and stuff like that. Yeah. And then having, you probably have a full -time C-O, you know, or at least someone, quote, playing the role. I have not said playing the role in many, many podcasts. You haven't, that's right. This is very apropos here. But yeah, shout out to be and shout out to, uh, operations people. Operations people who, in our last podcast that we did on, uh, AI, like who gets trained in AI and You remember they, they're like 66 % of, of surveyed executives expected people to, learn AI and to advance in the AI skills and only like 30 % of employees were getting training yeah yeah same same thing 66 was aspirational yeah sorry we got on a tangent for operations a little bit a tangent before we even got into a category this is a new this is a new high for us on the podcast right now track what you'll learn in this episode is how to spot when org flattening crosses into chaos, we'll so to get us back on talk about, how to learn when managers aren't the problem and it's more a we're not we want on system design issue. And then we'll talk about getting practical redesign tactics. before you go into any kind of or changes or redesigns or position or removal or anything like that. So those are the three things that I want to get out of this podcast all tangents aside, today. Awesome. the first categories, can you really delete mental management and expect work to magically reorganize. coordination, like it doesn't just disappear because the coordinators do. I segued into this last time and then we got way off topic. So we're going to stay on topic this time. Yes. How you'll know you'll be dealing with someone who is on the side of the against in this category is they'll give you one of these points. They'll say, listen, oh, flat orgs make people more empowered. They'll say less management leads to faster decisions and then meetings, Our meetings are more efficient and we can actually get some stuff done when the managers are not in our meetings. And the last one that I'll point out. if you empower people with autonomy and you actually distribute the decision -making, um, responsibilities, then, yeah, that autonomy, that empowerment and autonomy naturally replaces the hierarchy that most companies go with out of the box, which, which I will tell you in any other podcast, I would be firmly on the side of every single point that I just said. firmly in the camp, you know, very difficult to sway out of all those points. But today you're not in that camp? Today, I'm on the other side. Okay. Of the fence today, today I'm, I'm Wilson in home improvement with my, just my nose above the fence right now. Cool. All right. Well, I'll, I'll stay on the other side so we can have a game of ping pong or whatever, tennis. Um, Well, remember the bounding of this podcast is, Amazon is cutting 30 ,000, 30 ,000 people saying out of those 30 ,000, the vast majority are middle managers. And we need to just flatten, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has come out and saying hey, you don't want to work for middle managers, kids, right? you know, 44 that brings us to year old dude wearing a hoodie trying to look like he's 22. Yeah, just, just saying this, it's weird. It's weird, Mark, friend of the show Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, like, step in to my office mark it's it's strange it's odd we're a suit bro You like to be called, bro? That's what I'm asking Mark. He probably does. I, I, I'm gonna Photoshop Mark Zuckerberg into the middle of us right now. I'm not, let's, let's be honest. I'm not, I'm not putting that level effort into, yeah, no. let's kind of hear the other side of the, the equation a little bit. the opposite side, coordination. it's gonna rear its head no matter how flat you make your org under any other name maybe right but it will come back exactly so you're saying i don't need so like the issue with the the issue with the i don't need mental managers is let's break this door down real early in the podcast. We're saying middle managers and we're saying middle management. Most companies hear and see middle management and they're saying, oh, all these people that are not, they're not in IC contributor, quote, productive roles. Basically I'm saying we're shuffling scrum matches, agile coaches. Any person in the org whose role is mainly coordination, rather than I see engineer or, you knocking out code or require writing things or whatever, individual contributor, basically. Anybody who's not individual contributor, anybody who's not individual contributor. they're in this category of mental management. No matter if they actually supervise people or not, they're in this category for the purpose of this podcast. And the problem with that is, cool, let's get rid all the mental managers and have a completely flat org. The problem, though, is, it's not completely flat, is it? still got Zuck at the top. You do, exactly. So there's always a hierarchy. You know, there's never a completely flat, i.e. just a flat pancake. The leader and everybody else. You can, you can say you have that on paper, but with the passage of time, very little time, by the way, you're going to start introducing layers in the middle, even if they're informal. at the beginning, Because that, to your point, the coordination activities, they don't go away. Someone has to do them. So leadership, if you look up, right? All the leaders are gone. Leadership don't want to do those. They, they don't want to do them. But I'm telling you, when you slice away all the middle managers, the individual contributors don't, they, they don't take on the they don't take on the responsibilities. They don't take on the accountability. They don't, they don't automatically get the, oh, cool, we got rid of your manager. Oh, here's a here's a truckload of money with, with which to manage all of the assets and things that we own. on behalf of your department and group we don't just hand over that money to you it's owned by the person above your manager that didn't get cut so now now your manager who maybe was had like five people reporting into them cool they got cut we have less middle managers everyone's happy more coding right about that theoretically But in everyone's happy actuality, what happened is now your manager who had like five direct reports is gone. Now your manager's manager who has like 25 reports is now your new boss. So. Sounds great, right. Hey, I'll never see that guy. I, he barely even knows who I am. Cool, story, bro. But I mean, good thing you don't ever need anything from the organization, like money or promotion or coaching or, like somebody to break a tie or whatever on your behalf. Decisions. Yeah, I was going to go there. So what happens? Like the primary thing you're going to see right away, the initial symptoms would be decision latency. because those at the very top never made those decisions. I'm gonna call, um, decision latency is a great zinger. I'm gonna call that a decision bottleneck. because of the podcast we did where we referenced gold rat so much. I'm going back. I'm, I'm rolling the clocks back and going full gold rat and going, so you've gotten rid of the people whose job it is to. unblock, you, you see where I'm going with this, but to, to coordinate communication and decisions between teams, to ensure decisions are made in a timely and expedited manner to knock down blockers when they come up or when they see them coming up before they even become a blocker, right? And you've gotten rid of those people because you think that, oh, all they do is middle management. You've gotten rid of all this people. and said well, developers can do that. in the research for this podcast, downsizing, right sizing, whatever efforts, they go back to the 80s. And, and potentially before, I stopped digging when they went back to the mid 80s to the late 90s studies about cutting middle managers. and the effect. if you think that you don't need folks to do this coordination, think again. Yeah, I look, step into my office because I, who's going to do these activities? It's how many jobs can you get rid of in your workplace before? you wake up in the morning and you don't, you do so many different things, you don't even know what you do today. It's almost like you work in product management. Yeah, I think those people that say, well, we don't need middle managers, um, all those coordination, you know, things that they, they would have done or they, they did, they can be done by developers. There's two issues with that. You're keeping them, those developers around because they're ICs, right? So if you're gonna get them to focus on other things, they're becoming less icy. Yeah. But before that, the issue really is developers develop. That is their forte, right? Making these decisions, all these, that doesn't turn them on. They don't like doing all this stuff, going into meetings and stuff. They're always arguing against meetings. Leave me alone in my basement with my computer and slide some pizza on their door once in a while. And we're good. I'll crank out code all day long. So it's... it doesn't jive that they can do it right all these activities they'll just pick up the slack it doesn't jive it's a banana's argument it is because like again like all day long 24 -7 it's like you write all the code in your basement that nobody write all the code knows about and you don't ever talk to anyone that's what you're going to be doing you're writing code that nobody ever sees you need to get out there and talk to people that that's just like a That's not even, it sounds silly to say a lot, because it sounds like, you go, of course, of course, right, of course. But that, the same thing they're using to get rid of middle management, the same excuse you're using, oh, these people are just overhead. We can have more developers own. Well, more developers to do what? like this is just like we're saying middle management but i'm i'm lumping into middle management also the people that just do coordination that maybe don't manage because remember we people and i'm lumping into middle management the people whose job it is to bridge communication to other departments yeah because like your scrum master could be bringing the marketing folks in to say like hey understands that we the business need to coordinate with marketing for go -to -market activities and there may be some things that they want out of us to say, hey, before we go to market, you need to, you know, the, the development team needs to run some demos or set up some test data or some other things. They might want to put some stuff on your roadmap to, in support of their go-to -market. And that's a legitimate business activity. But if you just want to be oh, that's, this is just marketing people. I don't work for them and I don't do it. I'm not going to do anything of that. No one's ever going to be cool. No problem. No one's ever going to know that your software exists. And then, like, how are you going to make money at that point? Yeah. if you're considering flattening your org. start by mapping your coordination tasks before you start the cutting. At least, if you're not going to do anything else, at least do that. some, some steps here, identify, clarify, decide. Those are my three steps. Identify every regular cross -team dependency that you have, every touch point that you have on a regular basis. Um, clarify who owns each interaction. Right. Usually the product manager owns a lot of them. If you don't have product managers, maybe your tech lead or senior developer or something like that owns them. I've been on teams where the, basically the most vocal or personable developer owns them when they were, when the hierarchy is very flat, right? I've seen that before and then decide if you can remove that management apparatus. safely. Yeah. Yeah. And you've got, this meme pops into my head when we talk about this, especially when we will say, well, we don't need, you know, the middle managers likes our masters, or as well, whatever else. It's, the meme really is, is a, a boat, it's a Hawaii V -O style. They had all these team members rowing, and you've got somebody who's keeping the beat and somebody who's basically chanting in, out, the coordinator. Get rid of those people. Good luck, Roy, in the same direction. so have you seen flat with the initiative to move to flat orgs backfire? drop your horror story in the comments below and then next up ohm we're going to discuss what we touched on in the intro unbossing it's like it's not inherently wrong it's just not a normally done thing that is done in a non haphazard way category already before we even start arguing but uh it's not the org flattening layoffs that kill organizations it's flattening without rethinking how the work connects And in, with the last podcast that we had about, in, in arguing Agile 250, CEOs admit there's no, there's no AI, ROI, but they not to lead this keep buying it anyway, but they keep buying it anyway. we talked about, is real and we are entering that phase if the solo paradox where tools have been created to radically change the way the work is done today, but nobody's really adopting it and getting productivity gains out of it. I mean, people are adopting it, but they're not really getting productivity gains out of it because they'd have to change their whole work process and they're not ready to change their, they're not ready to upend, you know, they're not ready to go through that, quote, agile transformation or whatever it takes. Yeah, it's to get there. They're not willing to get there. Uh, that sort of this category is, you feel that your middle managers are not producing like your ICs. And you feel like you want more ICs, but you don't really, like you can't really put your finger on the button of like, what is the right level of coordination percentage of employees? And what is the right amount of time spent on coordination versus normal work, that kind of thing? So you kind of just like, take out your pocket knife and slash away a big part of the org. and say, Did I hurt myself? You know, you slash away a bit of your finger and say, do I have to go to hospital? Am I all right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, all of this is really leading to us saying, look. unbossing without redesign is organizational vandalism. Yeah, yeah, right. You know, you're destroying things here, really. Yeah. Well, you may not even know that you're doing it, right? the unrefying response to what you just said will be, sometimes we've got to break some things. Sometimes you get to break some eggs, um, to make an helmet. That's, that's one of the, listen, I, I'm already talking about against points. I might as well keep going. Keep going. we just need fewer layers on. I just feel like we have too many layers. Nobody will say, I just feel like those are, they'll, they'll, they will make a declarative statement and say, we have too many middle management layers. Um, we need to reduce and reuse and recycle. I don't, I don't know. Anyway, and then they'll say managers. don't add value. And they'll also say, and I know you, hopefully you'll go with me on this one. AI can replace middle managers. Is that a good one? If I replace middle manager in that statement and say, AI, AI can replace scrum masses. Does it make you feel better about the statement? No, it makes me want to throw up. But here's, so let me go back to the first one. You need another drink. I do need a drink. we just need fewer layers. Okay, I'll go with that. But when they say we need fewer middle layers, it's do you even know what they do? If you're saying you do need fewer layers, how about we start the top? There's way too many of you up there. You know, a lot of these big words, especially the matrix ones, they have the inverted pyramid. So you have too many people at the top. And if you cut only 10 % of those, it would be equivalent to cutting maybe 50 % of the middle managers because they have inflated salaries, egos, I don't know. Egos? Yeah, yeah, all of the above. So there are ways to do this, right? as far as manager roles don't add value. What else is inflated up there? Yeah, right. I just want to know. the same people who are saying, these middle manager roles don't add value, right? That to me, it just tells me that they don't really understand. what these, you know, these middle managers even do. the problem with middle management, when you say middle management, it conjures up to me. the idea of like a traditional org structure where you have workers and then workers all were put up to a manager and all the managers together report up this like different directors and those directors all together report up to like some kind of VP or senior manager or yeah something like that like it some kind of structure like that the real world is like way more chaotic than that organizations have like wildly different levels and it's not really like structured anywhere so I kind of almost don't know what this point is talking about but if you're gonna ground this point in saying hey deleting boxes off the org chart of like here's a middle management swim lane I'm just gonna delete that whole swim lane. If that's your, if that's your org design or, or restructure, and you're the Jensen Wang of the world being like, I can have 60, 60 direct reports. I'm great. I'm awesome. I tell people what to do, and they do it, um, I'm awesome at communication. Nobody ever asked me questions because nobody, I always communicate crystal clear. From the mouths of babes themselves. I'm pretty sure that's a direct Jensen Wayne quote is I don't need. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, it wasn't a Jensen Wayne quote. It was a Mark Zuckerberg quote is, hey, I just talked to people and I don't ever need to have one -on -ones. I just tell people what they need to know when they ask me questions. I clarify and I never need to have one -on-ones. And that, that's probably true for Mark Zuckerberg because, people are so awestruck or fearful when he talks to them. I, I thought I was, Jensen, but it doesn't matter who it was really at this point. I think it was, look, it might have been both. I can't tell all these people apart. What do you mean these people? I'm sorry. all right, let's keep going. So the last point about AI can replace middle managers. Maybe, but look, middle managers do a lot of stuff. They react in the moment. They make value judgments, they make decisions. how about we turn that and say, well, could AI maybe even replace some of the senior managers like leadership people? I, it's, I'm just saying that, but, you know, really. No, I think that comes from the fact that you really don't understand what they do. Look, I'm willing to wager at most large. middle to large sized organizations when they talk about cutting costs reducing head count basically they don't think about necessarily deeply at least what capabilities are they cutting they think about spreadsheets and sales and salaries and say we need to reduce 10 % of this bucket over here and you know x % of this bucket over here and that's a shame because you are throwing out the the baby with the bath water it's called a spreadsheet driven development. SDD. SDD. You don't hear about that too often in the developer community of a spreadsheet driven development. I wish that, the, Theo Gigi and everybody else would do some videos on the spreadsheet driven development. They won't because it's ridiculous. I, the, I mean, that, when the accountants are running your organization, that's what you get. That's most organizations. I, I've broadened. little crowbar in I've gotten my there, a mini crowbar, yeah. And I, and I've, and I've wedged apart the middle management to I've wedged that apart to put coordination into that role as well. Because I'm assuming the, I'm giving that layer of folk right now. the most bandwidth that I'm ever going to give them on a podcast. I'm giving the most latitude I'm ever going to give them on a podcast because, I'm putting scrum masters and people that are program managers. People like that, right? I, I would even, like, slot in some project managers into that position. Absolutely. Delivery managers too. Delivery managers. Yeah, yeah, that's true that the, the modern rebrand of the scrum master of the delivery managers. It sounds like they do more things. They deliver things. They bring my mail to my desk or other things. Anyway, they're translating strategy into execution via the coordination. that they do day to day. That, that's basically what they're doing. And if you're going to say AI is going to replace that, cool, that would be great. coordinating with a bunch of people in meeting and aligning in them, that's a lot of work. it's a lot of work that even the people doing that job, I don't think that they would cry too much to be like, hey, you're free of these responsibilities now. You can do more coaching and you can do more mentoring and maybe you can slide into some IC work and stuff. I think they would also be happy to do that if the tech was good at that kind of thing, which is not. the determinate, determinative versus, what do we say in the last podcast? probabilistic versus deterministic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. coordinating your work between teams, the person they can, in a deterministic manner drive the same kind of outcome every single time when you hand it over to the AI now they're giving you a probabilistic outcome which means 60 % of the time they'll do a good job and then the other 40 % they'll just completely space and be like well what did you ask me to do sorry i forgot that instruction hand it over to AI. I would love to hear your comments about this one. the companies that succeed at this. point and then move forward as a leaner, meaner, more flatten the org to a efficient organization. There are some companies out there, GitLab base camper ones that came in my research. They redesigned first, which meant they, they understood the processes and interactions between teams and communications. The, the whole. team topologies breakdown that we did a thousand million podcasts ago, uh, on arguing agile 60, six, seven. I was gonna be wager 100 plus, but arguing agile six seven team topologies organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. By the way, the team topologies book we recommend highly on the podcast. by Manuel Pice and the other guy. Matthew Skelton. Everybody should read it, to understand. I think they, I think they're coming out with another book or a follow up. They may have already done that. They might have already, yeah. We do need to do a follow up. We do. Yeah, on their work. Because it was a million. It was like two long time ago. Yeah, it was like four years ago at this point. But it's a great book, but it, if you read teen topologies and you understand that there's different types of teams. that have different coordination patterns and you, and then you were like, yeah, but I don't need this type of team or whatever. You should read that book first before you make that discern. I'll, what I'm saying is get educated before. Yeah. You start cutting, and I want to point that out because I want to say you flatten interactions. You don't flatten people. Absolutely. Yes. And if you flatten people first, which is what we're seeing all the time out there, uh, those interactions will come back and haunt you. Well, because the lack of them. skip steps. Sure. because people have They've not put in the work and they've jumped straight to, we can have all streamlined teams. I don't, I'm like, I'm not going to read the whole book. I read the four different modes, the streamline and enabling and subsystem and whatnot. to heck with all that we're just gonna have stream aligned flatten the whole org on stream aligned yeah not understand not understand that like well you're i mean your executive team is sort of like an enabling team if you think about it I didn't, I didn't get that. I didn't read that far into the book. I just read the manual pious part. I just saw the diagram. I didn't read the other guy's part. I only got first guy's part. when looking to flatten the org, What I'm saying is, you want to divide, reduce and then, conquer and then, Okay, so you want to utilize the visual. divide the responsibilities by team type. Because you remember, when you, when you're, when you're, when you're trying to flatten the org, first you need to make some sort of visual cue of the org. And there's no way you can just do that, you know, in your brain or whatever. Or in a spreadsheet, yeah. Yeah, I mean, or really on, I mean, if you're in a moderate size org, you can't even do it on a whiteboard. You need like several whiteboards, right? if you're lucky enough to be in a small enough organization, like a 200 people organization and you can do it on a whiteboard, cool, count yourself lucky. this advice is for you. You can modularize if you're in a large company, right? You can abstract down that to your point, you know, you just come up with high level and then a little less, you know, high, so more detail, a little more detail. So yeah, you could do it if you really wanted to, but this is, this is the point, right? Defined responsibilities by team type and not by hierarchy. Yes, and then you want to reduce your dependencies. before you reduce the head count. what, I mean, what does reduced dependencies even mean, Brian? that's, that, that doesn't even mean anything reduced dependencies. I'm, like, you just broke down your responsibilities by team type. You map out what your org looks like. You're, you're real org. enlightening things I ever did with team topologies by, Manuel Pius and the other guy. The one is I, took it upon one of the most myself at one of these like leadership, uh, sessions where they fly all, like leadership band and whatever. Yeah. So somehow I get invited. I, I think maybe I just showed up. I don't know if I really wasn't invited. But I, I, I broke the org down by team topologies and I mapped it out. Yeah. And I was this, this is the way that I envision that our org works in actuality. and, I remember everyone hated it. there was one thing, there was one thing that was like universally agreed on in that session. Everyone hated my diagram. They hated it because they, everyone was don't, we don't see this team as only doing X, Y, Z or whatever. we, we think that the, you know, the stream enabled teams might work on all these other different projects. And I said, then you have some problems in your that you need to deal with, but my, my diagram is the way that things are in actuality. And the issue that you're pointing out is the way that things are mapped out in actuality is not the way that things, that, that, that you envision should be. the org design that you desire this is a small company this is a small company this is a small company this is like a 30 person company right yeah i critiquing my design is not where you should put your energy you should put your energy into constructing constructing an org that is properly designed to scale. Yep. You know, with so negatively teams that interact with each other in in a positive matter. And, boy, I financially I don't think I ever recovered from that conversation because it, this team topology stuff could be, groundbreaking at your organization if your leaders really understand oh like i get it these are the interaction modes these are the types of teams this is the way everything works together but boy if you got any ego in that conversation if you got any kind of like but i think i'm smarter than manuel pious than the other guy i think that i can do things like you have you written where's mike millerette have you written a book Are you really as smart as you think you are? Can you wear a kilt? Can you wear a traditional kilt? I think the point you're making is very solid. So I didn't think about this earlier, you know, before this. If you're looking to reorg everything, if you just map out your organization a la team topologies. One of the things that lets you do at that point, before you take out the hatchet, is to optimize the structure of your org. And that might be a very useful interim step before you say, okay, now that I've done that and I understand what happens, all the interactions, etc. How can I now further optimize by, you know, moving people or moving people out completely, right, which is... which is where they start, unfortunately. But it might just, it might not just be people. It might be the interactions as well. Absolutely. yeah. So responsibility. Yes. Yes. So when you're mapping out interactions, you're, you're actually mapping out, it's sort of like, process design. You're mapping out value as well. Listen, it's, I sort of was trying to be on the other side of this podcast. I didn't want to go too deep into rehashing anything from arguing agile six, seven, because I think it's such a great number, by Manuel Pison and the other guy. But, yeah, yeah, you could totally say, it's not just the teams. It's what they do. you can go deep. You can go deep into this one. two on the takeaway is the point here, right? Reduce dependencies. We were trying to kind of head down to that think your number level after saying define responsibilities by, you know, the type of team you have and not by layers of hierarchy. and reduce your dependencies before you reduce your head count Great slide. It says define responsibilities by team type, not hierarchy. Team type this slide here that being stream align, enabling platform team, yeah, specialized subsystem, that kind of thing. The second point is you want to reduce your dependencies before you look at reducing your head count. The third point is you want to use visuals for all these things. So you've used visuals to show your teams. And then obviously you can like plug in who the people are under each team or whatever. And then, but, but also you want to show your dependencies between teams visually on this chart. And again, you're, you're looking at, oh, these people are just responsible for coordination. That's not a real job. That's just playing the role. I'm gonna have one of my developers do that part time. You could do that. this is a leadership level, at least middle management level. org design deep problem and like who has the skill who has been trained in your organization with the skill to do this kind of analysis this kind of organizational design and i know i know i know phd org design folks that grapple with this kind of stuff yeah i mean do you do your question who's been trained to do this etc slim to none slim just left really i mean this is lacking in most organizations i have to think because it's so difficult and because most people's education is not in this particular lane yeah that's part of why it's so bad because because when you involve ego in this kind of thing right when you involved ego in this kind of thing is like hey your organization is kind of designed like crap like that nobody wants to hear that no and also like i'm not i'm not selling it very well right now but also i'm kind of sick of your crap home that's what i'm saying right now like hey your organization just kind of designed like crap and also you are crap that that that's the way it sounds that's the way it sounds yeah yeah but you know if you're if you're a C level person and you, you care about the, the structure of your organization and you don't have anybody on staff who can actually even map this out like this, you could do a lot worse than getting outside help from professional people that do know how to do this. And they may tell you what you don't want to hear. That's what you want to hear. Just call B. She's, she's available. Just give her a call. Right. So what do you think? Do you agree that unbossing can work if you just redesign first, comment below and then stick around for the next discussion, because next we are talking about leadership vacuums and who ends up actually leading when all the managers vanish. Yes. Ninja vanish. That's what I'm saying, like Batman. So the hierarchy didn't die when we cut. all the middle managers it just went underground to reform and rise again podcast google uh had a no managers experiment and and in the prep for this they had a follow on project oxygen Larry Page and Sergey Brin tested this strategy, like getting rid of the middle managers and whatnot. In 2002, they eliminated engineering managers to see if a completely flat org would facilitate new ideas and hasten output from developers. That's right. Just like AI, They were trying to squeeze developers to make them faster. the ping pong tables is that that wasn't doing at home. That's what I'm saying. So the experiment didn't last long because Paige and Bryn soon They were soon overwhelmed by staff Google founders members direct requests for guidance and the minutia of the work day. And, uh, boy, they rolled all that back, super fast. sail, so they didn't want to be helping, uh, every little developer here and there. At that scale, it doesn't work. And where did they have yachts to they sail those yachts? I mean, could have been anywhere. We see you. That's all I'm going to leave in the podcast. I'm not going to get, quote, political. It's not political if you're. if you under-redacted? Yeah. Yeah, if you're, yeah, unredacted, that's right. I don't think the DOJ or whatever even redacted their names out of those files. The arguments here in the, hey, when you fire your managers, the ghost leaders, they come out of the woodwork. teams. self-organized and, the leadership that the managers were holding on to, that will distribute naturally in the organization where, where, you know, to the best people, to the people that should have had it in the first place. That would be the argument. And then also, emergent leadership should replace these formal reporting lines. And, and in any other discussion, I would be full in the camp of those two things. I mean, I hear those two points and I'm grabbing my sword and I'm rally into the cause. I don't know why it's 1250 AD. I don't know what's going on here. I'd say, you know, in the against category, I have seen on occasion some developers. take very well to this, right? And it'll just, because they're, they're basically hungry for this. They want to lead, their natural leaders, they're dynamic, they work well with people, as well as they churn out good code. So when given the opportunity or when the opportunity arises, they grab it. But you're not talking about the majority here. You're talking about very, very few people that will do this. That still leaves a void, right? So that's the only thing with this is, yeah, it's supposed to happen naturally, but does it? I don't think it does stuff. I like this category because, again, this, this category is, hey, when you fire all the managers and remember, because of the, the way we're going into this podcast, what I, what I am, like intimating as managers is also all the people that the org will hire for coordination purposes, project managers, program managers, scrum masters, delivery leads, whatever you want to title them, label them. We're getting rid of all those people. Traditional managers. Yeah, Mike, we're getting rid of all those people. So the cool, we got rid of all those people. It's just everything rolls back up to the Zuck now. Now, when you want to get something done, you'd go up to your boss that you'd have five direct reports. you'd have a one -on-one with them every week now you gotta wait a month now you gotta wait a month and maybe your your guy won't reschedule i said guy because it's probably gonna be a guy it's leaders that emerge that we're touting as a positive well they have no actual authority these informal leaders right they still have to go to the same people that you would have to go to because now everything's flat so you all got to go to the zuck and hope that he's not trying to what does zuck do like this starts civil wars in third world countries like what does he do like and hope that he's not busy with something else that's what i'm gonna say congressional hearing these informal maybe i mean or it could be anything maybe they're not pulling in front of congress maybe it could be anything yeah maybe your person is not available to you maybe your person is not so as busy as mark suckerberg is what we're saying and but maybe they are very busy that's what we're saying a friend of the show mark Zuckerberg that's right so that would be that'd be the trade off here is hey it's great we flatten the org we got rid all the scrum masters now the developers can play the role cool emergent hierarchies which is what we're talking about like if we got rid of our managers now the hierarchies is just emerging we we sent whoever we want to speaking of congress to the scale daily scrum or to the leadership or to the product meeting or whatever because maybe we don't have you know product managers or whatever or maybe our product managers are like like like we worked at lincoln and like our product managers are all like those people they're they're all they're very busy looking very nice on camera yeah and their only interaction with the development team is like once every four months when they get a retreat to hawai yeah retreat or something like that yeah and otherwise they just talked to their one technical eat out of india or whatever and you know and they get lunch all day and post tictox of it the emergent hierarchies create politics instead of creating clarity if the structure of the business is weak and by and the way you need to read into what i just said was you just sliced all the middle managers and coordination folks out of the organization and in place in its didn't put anything place. So it's not like you came up with the lattice work in the structure of here's how we'll communicate, here's how your team will talk to other teams and whatever. Like you didn't, you didn't fix the system first and then start slicing. You slice first and said, well, the structure will be emergent. Good luck with that. That's all I got to say. Yeah, right. That's, I cut your budget and you'll figure it out. Yeah, that's basically the same thing. Oh, and to figure this, whatever it is out, you have no authority to boot, right? So that just makes matters worse. It's like saying, you know, go make me some tea, but you just can't have the water. where's Carmen at? Throw down, uh, this this lattice work of oh you'll lead through influence like your influence like your influence leading like that that as a structure it rewards confidence not competence because and i'm confident if you're competent and I make 10 decisions and nine of them are bad and you make three decisions and all of them are good I'm the one in that hierarchy that's gonna get rewarded absolutely yeah I mean hands down this so this is this is what you see out there right but you're leaving it it's sort of like okay throw a seed in this you know in the soil and maybe something will happen so yeah I mean you're not really increasing your chances of success deliberately when you're doing this, right? Hopefully it'll be emergent, maybe it is. I mean, if most of your stuff is, you know, offshore out, your chances diminish a little because people just want to do what they do. You pay me to develop. It's all I'm going to do, right? You know, so I'm not a fan of this idea of, yeah, it'll just grow when there's enough water and sunshine. I, no, no, you have to do something deliberate, right? Fertilize it. you know, give it some water once in a while. I mean, that's not even to mention that, you're going to be burning out folks under this kind of deal, you know. Right. three good decision decision makers versus the, the people are just shotgunning out things or whatever. Those, those folks, the three good decision makers, they're going to have burnt out quick and, they're right, right. And then smart developers will probably look at this and say, wait. You fired all the middle managers and now you want me to take the helm and become one. Why would I do that? I'm just, you need developers, right? You're keeping us as developers. So I'm just going to stay in my lane. I'll be developing. And I don't want any of that other stuff because that's just a, you know, a way to get me closer with the revolving door out there. I get, yeah, so when you're going about removing your formal leadership. explicitly assigned decision, accountability and authority, because again, those two go together of you, first you named the decision, then you assign transparent ownership of that, that segment of the business, that decision, all right, responsibility. I'll say that that too. And then you review and evolve constantly. between all of the different folks that own different things because some things might overlap between different teams i'm just saying you it's not set in stone you've got these invisible managers that that are filling the vacuum don't let it all be done invisibly so i put those things up on the screen let people take them in for a minute that awesome we're have you seen ghost managers appear after restructurings? Let us know in the what do you think? comments below. and then next, O'm and I are going to talk through. ladders lost all their rungs all their footing and they just slid how the corporate down yeah and maybe how to rebuild them although i'm gonna tell you right now i don't know if they can't be rebuilt no not easily middle management you don't just delete bureaucracy you career mobility for most people. And I know that this is you also delete like dying down, you know, this is definitely died down over the years, collapse of the corporate ladder. It's a real thing because people's trajectories at certain companies are kind of tied to the corporate ladder. So if you're saying basically there's no future outside of an IC role at this company, you're basically saying there's no future at this company. And that would be good to know when you when you delete start working a job. I mean that the, the arguing points against this, against this one, they're pretty shallow. it, so I'm just going to get them out of the way right now. They're, they're going to say something along the lines of. the guy sees that they don't need managers to mentor them, right? Traditional managers, right? People in the, in the role of manager, playing the role. Playing the role, yeah. They have maybe team leads or they have seniors or whatever, or maybe there's people under the departments that are seniors. and then they'll say, everyone can grow because we have strong peer learning in our organization home. and of course they'll say career letters are. out in outdated concept because it's just not the corporate letters is not a thing anymore. Like everyone's moving jobs every two years, especially younger people. So there's no, the corporate letter's dead. Yeah. And in favor of that argument, they could just say, you know, if you're a flat organization, there's not much of a ladder anyway. Right. Maybe a step stool? I don't know. I hope. Yeah. One hopes. But that point you made, you know, most people. I think it's fair to say to jump from job to job fairly regular, especially Gen Z used to, right? I think there's been a little bit of research around that. They don't stay around in the job very long. Yeah. this is not the podcast to talk about that topic because it's not you know well this is part of this is part of the reason though but exactly yes this is part of the reason i mean a lot of people when they start work they don't think about oh i just want to stay here for a year or two years they don't think about it like i want to believe that that they don't think about it like that but pretty soon they find out all of these things that makes them uncomfortable and say maybe grass is greener on the other side. and if their skills are in demand, it's easier for them to, to hop. I feel like we've stumbled on what could be a whole separate. killer podcast at this point that there are like the the younger generation is reacting to this trend by just job hopping more frequently than anybody ever you know anybody ever in in the corporate environment and basically they're saying we see an environment without clear pathways up in the organization and their motivation and their motivation and their retention in the organization have responded by taking the nose dive because there's no clear pathways anymore. there's no career or ladder because, oh, we want to be flat. We don't value any of these middle management positions or coordination positions We don't value that. And then the flattening has also removed the feedback loop. of the, the, the more positive feedback, feedback loop that you would get from a mental manager. And I say the more positive, meaning, that were out there good mental managers that actually were sponsoring your growth and lobbying for it and trying to, unblock your growth through the organization, basically. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that'll be a great podcast. You know, and those people have been pushed out because, because people that have spreadsheets say, there's, we, we can't assess a value. We don't know how to assess a value to coaching and mentoring and sponsorship. So we, we assess zero and, you end up on our next spreadsheet of, people are cut. You end up being read as a cell. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that podcast at some point. if the only, if the only path to promotion meaning, promotion meaning more money is into these managerial roles and the roles disappear. And also, the mentorship benefit of those roles is disappearing. Then, uncovered a, uh, a big reason for this, I think we've really you know, the younger folks just, just, oh, they're all job hopping or whatever. I mean, they're not really job hopping. It's just, you're not investing in them anymore, like you did in previous generations. because you were, because you're trying to penny pinch that, that middle layer that you're not quite, you don't understand how to put a value to sponsorship and training and coordination, that layer of the organization that does all those things. Right. Absolutely. And there is, I mean, again, that'll be another podcast, but there is maybe at least one way to figure out that value, but we'll cover that in that podcast. here. to unboss so the takeaway without killing this growth layer of your organization, this layer of your organization that enables growth, You somehow need to separate IC performance from the coordination and mentoring without. regard to promotions, right? Because that, that coordination mentoring layer that, what we call middle management, that's traditionally seen as a promotion path from the individual contributor. So you take your best developer, you put them on a path to become the boss and now their job is not to develop anymore and use any of their actual skills they got to be there. Now their job is just people skills, which they suck at. and then then they become a terrible boss yeah terrible first -time boss and now we do a whole podcast about them or whatever like companies now that are especially now there's tons of that like to silicon valley and everyone's lauding the individual contributor you know left and right everybody's an individual contributor with AI and whatever so there's like many many levels of i see principal product manager that, you know, that staff product manager, that kind of thing, this is already happening, but, but what I feel is not as clear in what has been happening is the, that coordination and mentoring. part of the job like where did that go they didn't land like team leads you would think that's where it goes possibly yeah but not clear not clearly but they yeah i agree not clearly a team leads are team leads because of their experience but mainly technical right they've not been enabled in mentoring etc really i mean some may gravitate that way anyway naturally but you know, because they're people oriented, but most team leads haven't been afforded that opportunity. the other thing I was going to say here is, that, that team lead position or that lead position, utilize that position because the lead indicates that they go between teams. They're not, not tied to any one team. Right. So that's the lead indicates me. I'd be interested in what other people have seen in this kind of, you know, the person that goes between teams, kind of, they're not really a manager. They're not really a supervisor. They're more like a principal. I think about the principal role or the staff role, would be this type of position. They're, they're leads to me. There are many titles out there, right? Chief, chief developer, those kinds of things. Yeah. my other point here in the takeaways is to track and show growth rather than traditional outcome based promotions. project across the get that last big finish line, and that was the project you need for your promotion or whatever. Yeah. That, and that's the way, that's, that's, that's the carrot in the sticking corporate America. I think that's a super old model. I think that the, the growth over time from where you started at to where you are now, you know, and showing that these are the stair steps you need to go up to, to grow. I think that's what, what lends you, your promotion in the, kind of the modern org. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Again, that's, I've not seen that very often, but that's how it should be, in lieu of the traditional sort of hierarchical. I mean, that's it for now. on to the next category. So do you miss career letters is what I'm asking? We're going to move I know you don't, but do you, Do you really miss them or you really not miss them? let's know in the comments. Like, comment below, comment below if but do it quick because next, we're going to close out the podcast, by talking about, what real unbossing looks like. Not, not the theory, but the actual design of how you would do this. So real unbossing, in order to do unbossing, which is also I'm, I'm cringing, I said it so many times in this podcast and it still doesn't mean anything. in order to do it and do it properly, it's not a subtractive process. It is an architectural process. You can't, you can't unboss people. You have to unboss processes or processes, processes, processes. Processes. that does assume that you have your processes well defined and well widely understood as well. Yeah, That, that would be the issue. And, and also, right away in the steel man side of these points to say, I'm gonna start listen, you can't iterate your way into flatness. And, and also, if you're gonna have team autonomy, by default, that means that you're going to have less managers. non i see people and delegate that stuff to the teams get out of here and again like part of the capital one layoff that never really got we talked about it a little bit we did yeah but like the the capital one thing is like they they they centralized all the folks over here in this like COE or whatever and then we need to cut more you had to go to the COE or whatever and then the layoffs not going to have this COE and all these people over these whatever 1,200 people or whatever they cut over here in this in they said well we're this agile COE we're going to put those job rules in the teams and they're going to be responsible inside the individual hierarchies that the teams are responsible for and that was kind of like nuance that nobody read in the big news article yeah now now i i say that but also i never followed up to see did they actually hire those people in the teams or they they cut 1,200 people and they hired like Three people. My, my wager is on the ladder. Oh, okay. But again, I haven't followed up. Three, six, yeah. Team autonomy is great. and it organically means fewer managers, but the fuel here is the authority you give your people, right? Yeah. And if that's lacking, then it's not going to be effective at all. then it would just be a reorg for reorg's sake and you'll probably still end up reducing numbers and head counts and all that but effectiveness no i'm not gonna get that i category, you know, you, you architect autonomy through boundaries. And that comes straight out of the team topologies book. You usually get product boundaries or at least like, feature boundaries inside of a product, you usually can draw the distinctions. Yep. Inside the swim lane of the a few things in this streamline teams. arguing Agile 67 was a billion years ago. But it's all still relevant. Absolutely. Three and a half, whatever year is later from when we did it. Yeah. also spans of control, they don't matter as much as flows of context. Ooh, boy. Now, this one, this one is from a fortune, article, I guess. yeah, the more, there are very few words in that, right? But they mean a lot, at least to me, spans of control matter less than flows of context. By the way, that fortune article is called executives are drowning. blame the vanishing middle management layer, by Lily May Lazarus on April 21st, 2025. We'll, put a link to the article in here, but, it's got more context, that, that fortune article about spans of control matter less than flows of context. Because the, the executives, they have the flows of context. but then they have to keep repeating that over and over again to everyone that comes asking because again like they they eliminated all the different layers that would yeah that would relay their message is it's like their radio station but they like they got rid of all like the uh affiliate uh stations so they have to go out and broadcast a message if they wanted to get out And like, again, we had a podcast on like, uh, repeating the message or something. It wasn't called repeating the message, but that's what it was. Yeah, and communication. The subtext of the podcast was about if you're in leadership, I mean, you're basically your job role is to like to broadcast. You need to keep the message you'd repeating it over and over again. for as long as you want people to believe it and the minute you stop repeating it people are going to start like the doubt will creep in yeah and without that middle layer this is more of a drain on your time and energy as well yes we know you don't want that so there is that i mean maybe you don't want it but also You can hire people to do that for you. You can. Just saying. And they would be the middle there. Thanks. I mean, there's that, the final point I want to say with when you're doing this right, reducing your cognitive load. oversight and does not put you in the you should be spot of constant vigilance this is the secret sauce right it's not we're not saying that you know don't unboss we're saying do it the right way that's what we're saying in this podcast and earlier in the podcast we've laid out some steps that you know get you to do it the right way if you follow those right and hopefully you will be also not overstressed with having to do more oversight if you did it the right way. Right. That last point of, reducing cognitive and does not add load. Boy, that, that's, my dream podcast is just specifically a podcast talking about cognitive load. What, what it is how to recognize it, how to, kind of draw healthy borders on your cognitive load to approach your management to be like, hey, look, I'm like in any given day. like people of my, people of my age would call it multitasking, like unhealthy multitasking. But, it's, it's just, it's a murky subject when you try to point it out to be like, well, everyone multitasks. Brian, just like get over it. You just got in order to get better at multitasking, you just got to prioritize better. I don't, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. Especially when we're eliminating the middle managers and we're, pushing all that stuff down to the developers like really eliminated business analysis yes we push that down to the developer now we eliminated QA push before QA we were that down the developer now we're eliminating the developer's managers push it down the developer Before any of that, the agile movement eliminated anyone that talked to customers on development teams behalf. Right. Now the development teams talking to customers. the development team should do their own marketing, you know, in certain circles product management. the product managers and development team should do their own marketing yeah like there's a lot of stuff now is like at what point are we arguing that you don't need any other people in the business other than just that that small development team of you know whatever the two pizza team yeah yeah yeah i agree this is it's just one of those things that when you think about it right Can they just do everything by themselves? Do they have the skills? Do they have the, you know, the authority, etc? Maybe they should all become salesmen and sell things. But you got the skills, you got the time, you get the authority, great. do you really want to be on an island by yourself like forging ahead with no help you you're on that island who's developing i mean it seems like you're taking on a lot yeah for sure so that yeah the cognitive load podcast is a solid one too we we're probably two or three really good ones today all right yeah in the future i this category are going to sound a lot like the takeaways we already talked about, in, in several the other sections. We talked about to do. unbossing right you gotta define your interaction boundaries. I know we've already said the takeaways in that before. Yes. And you can do this with team topologies by, skeleton and the other guy. And then you can, recast managers as system enablers. And in the manager slot, I won't, I want to pop scrum masters into there or scaled teams or any of these other things that people will say, That's just overhead. Sure, it's overhead, but again, that overhead, that's, when you say overhead, I hear air cover. Yes. And, and, and I will tell you, I don't want to go to war without air cover. When you say over here, that, yeah, task approvers, the, the mechanistic side of things, rather than enabling, you know, the people, the processes. I didn't talk about yet was flattened only after you can stabilize your workflows. in the last podcast, we talked about Deming specifically in Deming, if a process is not within statistical control you have no chance in enhancing it or improving it or whatever runaway process basically yes right so you need to bring those process or you need to stabilize them and bring them into statistical control before you can think about any kind of improvement you know and this is the same thing before you can say i don't need to manager for this I the last point here know all the steps to do whatever. And then, you know, if you're hearing something like that, you take a step back for a second and say, is this ego that I'm hearing or do you really have, can you show me your flow chart? Can you show me on the whiteboard? Can you show me on the doll? I mean, it's complicated. That's what I'm saying. so with everything we, we discussed today. that we've been talking about today, does the unbossing which is not a real word, but we've been talking about it like it's a real word. Does it excite you or does it terrify you? Let us know in the comments below and also like and subscribe because every like, I think it saves a puppy. We like puppies on this podcast. That's right. So we talked about org flattening. And when it crosses into chaos, when it, when it's, when it's done in the sort of a train wreck, haphazard manner, which is most of the time, which is most of the time. we talked about why, quote, managers are not the problem. it's, it's really usually a problem with system design, like your org is scaled kind of out of control. We talked a lot more about practical redesign tactics before you start cutting away any large layers or, or going into any of these, initiatives to, to, to, to downsize your mental management, your coordination layer of the organization. this was a cool topic. I wanted to talk about it at a high level. I feel like we've achieved that in this, uh, podcast. So let us know, let us know if there's things that we left out or if there's things that, that you would have hoped that we talked about that we didn't. Yeah, or any other topics, for that matter. That's right. Thank you staying with us. Like and subscribe once more. I