Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 1), with Jean-Denis Greze, Head of Engineering @ Plaid #17

Organizational change is hard. Jean-Denis Greze shares how he thinks about building organizations that can adapt in a way that preserves strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities or “spikes” through periodical “forced changes.” He’ll explore what those forced changes are and what they’ve looked like at Plaid and other companies.

"You're asking me what makes us different. I think it's that we've been really deliberate about building what I would call a ‘spiky org’ as opposed to a very balanced organization. The reality is when you're in a fast-growing company, it's much easier to do a few things well than to try to do everything.” - Jean-Denis Greze

ABOUT JEAN-DENIS GREZE

Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid.

Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams.

Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School.

SHOWNOTES

• What you should focus on when building an organization: Be a "spiky" org (2:31)
• How to change and adapt your organization that preserves your strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities: force yourself to adapt your “spikes” (7:01)
• Recruiting, Growth and Performance Management as “spike” examples in organization building (and why it's NOT useful to be good at all three of them) (8:15)
• The org design dilemma between "Hiring Well" vs. "Firing Fast" (12:01)
• The org design dilemma between business impact vs. craft and quality (18:27)
• How you know when you should change your strengths, values and build a new "spike" (24:48)
• The dilemma of building an organization with bottom-up vs. top-down decision making (27:47)
• How to develop new strengths, capabilities, or “spikes” in your engineering organization (32:20)
• Jean-Denis's process to create space for questions, creativity, and problem-solving (36:33)
   

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