When I joined Instagram in 2015 as head of engineering, the company had been part of Facebook for three years. It had 115 engineers, but we would soon scale to 300, and later grow to over 400 in 2017. It was not an easy task, but I had a powerful weapon in mind from the start: reorganization.
How We Reorganized Instagram’s Engineering Team While Quadrupling Its Size
Define the outcomes you want, and the structure will follow.
November 27, 2017
Summary.
The first thing to do in a reorganization is to determine the desired outcomes as a team. The new organizational structure reveals itself naturally once guiding principles are solidified. Good structure should be simple. An organizational model is like a machine, so the fewer moving parts there are, the less likely it is to break. Once you are confident in the new organization, it is important to get concentric buy-in — not just from management but from the entire organization.