High-agency strategy || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

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AI has torn up the org charts of engineering-first tech orgs. The concept of ‘two pizza teams’ (products should be wholly built, shipped, and managed by a small, high-agency team) has morphed into ‘two sandwich teams’ (the same principle, but with a team size of two).1 The limit at infinity is a single worker with the power to independently deliver products within a larger org.

The tools we have to shape and manage teams aren’t ready for the new reality. Companies are pushing managers back into IC work (see the growing list of former CTOs who have become ICs at Anthropic), creating “HI-C”s. But who (or what) does the management work instead?

Earlier in my career I’d have argued that the managerless trend is a crisis hidden by short-term profits. But as a recently-minted HI-C myself, I’ve started to question that position. Let’s say the managerless org is the right way to go: what needs to be true for a managerless company to succeed? (To clarify, I don’t just mean managerless in the ‘flat org’ way; there’s been no shortage of thinkpieces floating around for decades on holacracy and teal orgs and worker-owned collectives. I mean managerless as in a flock of starlings: the birds don’t have standup meetings or roadmaps but they still manage to flock in elegant formation, coordinating to accomplish complex goals)

In Design from the inside I argued that designers at AI-enabled startups have to work from the inside to influence the products they ship. But what about the much-vaunted seat at the table? Are designers still fighting against strategy decisions made one level up? What if you’re a founder or exec of an AI-accelerated company? Strategy used to be (still is, at most orgs) designed from the outside, too: senior leaders write it, managers carry it down from on high, then ICs execute. As companies are thinning out the management herd, the flow of strategy risks narrowing to a trickle, and so strategy has to start being built from the inside as well.

If strategy is the longest lever on the outcomes of the team, how do you design the strategy from the inside?

The first few threads to pull on here are strategic salience and memeticity . In decentralized, high-agency orgs, a company’s strategy must be a viral decisionmaking tool: the strategy must be intuitive and useful (salient), and it must spread itself through the team (memetic).

Salience means strategy guides action. Memeticity means strategy survives distribution.

Salience

Salience is the degree to which a company’s strategy can be understood and used by its average employee.

‘Understood’ is straightforward. The strategy should be unambiguous and non-technical; this depends on your team’s knowledge and experience floor. Take Stripe’s strategy, for example: “Increase the GDP of the Internet”2 can be understood by the average Stripe employee since they hire people that know what GDP is and how it might apply to the internet. Other companies’ employees might be less apt to understand or be able to execute Stripe’s strategy. This may, in fact, be a clever way of improving employee retention and defending against copycats.

It’s important that employees understand the original intent of the strategy, not just the syntax and grammar of how it’s written. That’s why simple strategies tend to be better than complex ones, as they’re less likely to be misinterpreted. More on that in a bit.

‘Usability’ means the strategy can help any given employee make day-to-day decisions. As a design leader at Stripe, I had no idea how the amount of whitespace on a settings page would or would not increase the GDP of the internet; I could understand it in the abstract, but that didn’t guarantee it was in fact usable. “Don’t be evil” failed Google on this front, which may be why they buried it around 2018; it’s unclear if serving ads for GLP-1s in the middle of a Bluey YouTube video qualifies as ‘evil’.

Stripe’s strategy is understandable, but not usable. What about the opposite? Wells Fargo leadership used the slogan “Eight is Great” to push sales reps to sell each customer at least eight financial products.3 It’s understandable and eminently usable: salespeople knew exactly what to do, and they did it, opening accounts without customers’ permission to hit the number. Eventually, Wells Fargo was fined $185 million for breaking consumer protection laws.4

Salience makes a strategy powerful, not wise; a strategy that’s easy to act on gets acted on, even if the aims are rotten. (Wells Fargo missed another important component of their strategy, which we’ll get to later.)

Amazon is the undisputed heavyweight champion of salient strategy:

Before a team at Amazon builds anything,...