Product Strategy · Enterprise SaaS · Organizational Design · 2026
- Role
- Design Lead
- Surface
- Internal operating system
- Org
- 200 people · 0 managers
- Modules
- 8
- Status
- Shipped · under NDA
Open asks
Committed
Blocked
Two hundred people. No managers. Eight modules doing the job of an org chart. The whole thing runs on transparency: salaries, finances, project assignments, reviews — open to everyone. That holds at forty. At two hundred, the hallway stops scaling. What lives in one person's head stays there, and the org grows a quiet hierarchy to route around the gap.
The ask said design tooling for a 200-person company with no management layer. The actual ask: build coordination that doesn't smuggle a hierarchy back in through the side door. Every obvious feature — task assignment, approval flows, escalation paths — was a manager wearing a different name. The job was saying no to each one.
So transparency did the coordinating instead. Who's on what, who's blocked, who decides — visible to everyone, always. Pull, not push. Commitments, not assignments. Eight modules — staffing, comp, OKRs, onboarding — all spoke one object model, so the org could rebuild its own process with nobody in the room to arbitrate.
Here the user base and the org structure were the same two hundred humans. So every design decision was an organizational one — there was no other kind. Client is under NDA. The argument carries forward.
Want to know more about this work?
Hiring? In an interview I'll walk you through the decisions, the artifacts I can't host publicly, and the numbers — under mutual NDA.
Send me the roleDesign Patterns Demonstrated
This project is a detailed case study in designing for human-in-the-loop decision-making at scaled organizational settings:
- Human-in-Loop Patterns: Decentralized peer leveling, transparent company salary setting, and collaborative project prioritization bidding workflows.