Level-up Engineering Guide to Improve Organizational Decision Making: Restructuring Foursquare
Interview with Ankit Patel, SVP of Engineering at Foursquare. He explains how he realized that Foursquare's decision making process requires a rehaul, and what he did to completely restructure the entire organization to create more efficient decision making.
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In this interview we're covering:
- Organizational decision making issues
- New organization structure
- Finding the solution
- Role of leadership in rebuilding organizational decision making
- Getting buy-in from the teams
- Changes in hiring
- Common mistakes in organizational decision making
Excerpt from the interview:
"The challenge was enabling fast decision making based on the customers’ needs. Foursquare has been in hypergrowth, and we’d been developing teams based on profession. You often had to cross VP boundaries just to discuss a product feature, and our products require a lot of this type of collaboration.
We were slow to innovate, which made it difficult to drive change. You needed at least three to four teams to work together to get anything done. This caused a cascading effect where delays in one team impacted other teams as well.
This also made prioritization difficult. When you had an emerging idea, you often needed executive involvement to set up priorities. This slowed down innovation and the overall workflow."