The CEO and founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong has laid out his vision to rejig the operations of the firm to make it more efficient and maintain the insurgent mindset of the company.
Armstrong in a company blog post wrote, “After 18 months of ~200 per cent y/y employee growth, many of our internal tools and organising principles have started to strain or break. So we’ve been digging in to identify the set of changes we need to make to help us succeed at this new scale.”
He has noted down several steps to achieve efficiency, starting off with pushing decision-making down to single-threaded directly responsible individuals (DRI). This essentially gives product leaders from various teams the ability to make decisions and act more quickly without having to alert seniors.
The firm will also divide its teams into smaller “pods,” limiting the size of each team to no more than 10 people, who’ll work on a specific feature or area.
‘Functioning like a standalone company’
Team leaders will have access to P&Ls for their products and other performance indicators so they can move their products toward positive margins and make better decisions.
“We believe the right way to compete is to incentivise our product leaders to also run their product more like a standalone company,” Armstrong said.
Coinbase is also experimenting with banning slide decks in product and engineering reviews. Instead of a slide deck, teams can show the product itself or the dashboard with the metrics.
In order to reduce the time spent on meetings, the company will move to a model where teams publish APIs so that other teams can benefit from whatever is being built without needing to schedule a meeting.
Lastly, Armstrong notes that the insurgent mindset has to be maintained as the company grows bigger. “We always try to make products that are the most trusted and easiest to use, so we can bring a billion people into crypto,” he wrote.