Experiment with a bit of anarchy

FT.com

 
January 28, 2014 3:45 pm

By Jeevan Vasagar

©Marco Urban

Flat future: Christian Reber, right, and Chad Fowler are stripping out management at 6Wunderkinder

When 6Wunderkinder was founded in 2010 with just six people, it was easy enough to maintain a casual atmosphere. But as the Berlin tech start-up has grown, a matching hierarchy has evolved.

Now employees number about 60 and it takes a conscious effort to maintain some of the start-up spirit. “Sexy Friday” helps: developers get a day a week to pursue their own passions, the equivalent of Google’s “20 per cent time”. Once a year it holds Wunderkamp, when all staff spend a week in forest cabins in Bavaria or on the Baltic coast. Again, the aim is to break up working patterns and branch out intellectually.

But it is not enough. In an effort to recover the vitality of its early days, the business, which makes Wunderlist, the task management tool, is em­bark­ing on a radical experiment in unpicking its hierarchy. It is doing so at a moment when, thanks to an injection of venture capital funding, it is poised to expand.

As Chad Fowler, the chief technology officer, puts it: “Now it’s time to say OK, you can do your passion project if you can fit it within the rules . . . You have to recruit people to work with you on it. You have to deliver it. You have to own it.”

Instead of allotting staff a day a week to pursue their own projects, they will be encouraged to dir­ect themselves all the time. Below a senior management team of four, the hierarchy will be dissolved, leaving team leaders to communicate what is going on rather than telling colleagues what to do.

Instead of managers, there will be ground rules. Projects must fit into the company’s stated business goals and employees will have to prove the project will help reach those goals.

Mr Fowler, a bearded American with an easy-going manner, is explaining all this at 6Wunder­kinder’s offices – open-plan with bare boards and high ceilings – in Berlin’s Mitte district, ahead of a move to new headquarters.

Currently, the staff are split into teams by platform: developers working on Android are separate from those working on Windows, for example, and there is also a cross-platform team. But after the move, there will be a physical reboot as well as a cultural one. Employees will no longer be spread over three floors but will all be on the same floor at the Factory, a new start-up campus, and will be able to switch desks according to project.

Probably every single company wants to maintain the feeling of being in a start-up, no matter how big they get - Christian Reber, 6Wunderkinder chief executive and co-founder

Proponents of flatter hierarchies in businesses argue that they en­cour­age employees to think more broadly about the company and its goals.

Fred George, a veteran software developer who worked from 2007 to 2012 at Forward Internet Group in London, says the operation hired programmers who were “capable of talking to customers themselves, figuring out what needs to be done”. In most cases, he says, “the business demands are not that complicated com­pared to programming languages”. Forward, which ac­quires and invests in internet companies, grew from a staff of 35 people to 470 in four years and never had a detailed management structure, he says. “The team could set priorities and figure out who was the best person to work on that.”

Mr George then worked for Mail Online, digital arm of the British newspaper, where he advised on flattening the tech side of the business. “Most project managers were programmers in a for­mer life. These [man­ager] roles became redundant,” Mr George says.

A flatter command structure allows developers to work faster and encourages innovation, evangelists claim. One of the fruits of this at Mail Online was Fe­mail Fashion Finder, which allows readers to click on pictures of actresses and buy the outfits they are wearing, or similar but cheaper styles.

At 6Wunderkinder, they are working on a similar enabling process. At 27, Christian Reber, the German chief executive and co-founder, is just under the average age of his employees.

Mr Reber says: “On an assembly line you al­ways get the work you expect. People do the stuff you tell them to do. What we, here, try to achieve is that we regularly get the ‘wow’ factor . . . if everyone acts like a CEO, they make the decisions, [if] they are responsible for their own projects, then it completely changes [the] dynamics.”

He adds: “Probably every single company wants to maintain the feeling of being in a start-up, no matter how big they get.”

A flatter hierarchy is also an advantage when it comes to retaining staff in a highly competitive sector. Mr Reber says: “The talent pool is extremely limited, people choose the workplace, especially developers, bas­ed more on the working atmosphere – the culture, rather than the salary.”

The anarchy at 6Wunderkinder will be strictly licensed, however. The senior management team will retain direction of the company and, once middle-ranking management is dissolved, may even play a more vigorous role in coaching the teams.

In making such changes, 6Wunder­kinder is among a number of technology businesses that are aiming to flatten hierarchies (see below) .

Companies in the tech sector are not bound by the linear processes that manufacturing or engineering companies have to follow. Mr George, now at Outpace Systems in California, says: “We’re not building bridges. We can build the top of the bridge before building the struts holding it up. We don’t live by the laws of physics. We’re beginning to learn how to take advantage of that.”

. . .

There remain, the 6Wunder­kinder leaders admit, some unanswered questions about how they will make the new system work.

The biggest, they feel, is maintaining consistency within a family of products while giving developers freedom to come up with new ideas. Mr Fowler says: “Our business is engineering work but it is essentially design-driven. We have a bunch of designers who design our products, who take care that it looks and feels the exact same way.

“With ultimate freedom as a management concept, it’s quite hard bec­ause, technically, you can’t tell someone ‘don’t do that’, you have to wait until . . . the project fails.”

Which leads to the other big unanswered question: how to judge when a project should be called off. Mr Reber says this could be when the team working on a project starts to raise concerns.

Alternatively, the company’s new rules could set a time limit to establish whether a new idea is working.

It is, of course, central to the spirit of the experiment that there are unanswered questions. “We need to resist the temptation to try to fix every problem before we present [the organisational reboot] to the team,” Mr Fowler says. “We don’t actually have to solve the problem, we just have to make sure that the question is asked.”

-------------------------------------------

If you are feeling flat, try having less hierarchy

● At 37signals in Chicago, Illinois, the software company’s employees are encouraged to extend their knowledge while staying in a hands-on role, rather than take on management responsibility. Co-founder Jason Fried describes this as promoting horizontally instead of vertically. Mr Fried once wrote in Inc magazine that traditional promotion “often drives people further away from the job they are actually good at – we reward with responsibilities closer to the work”.

● A majority of workers at GitHub, a collaboration platform for software developers, work remotely, linking up with the rest of the company in chat rooms, and choosing their own projects. Co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner, highlighting the importance of communication, says the company is “highly networked” rather than “flat”.

● Valve, the US games maker, based in Bellevue, Washington, lets employees choose their work and form ad hoc teams based around projects. It has a system in which staff rank each other’s skills to help determine pay levels.

Share this post