4.1 The Story

I believe I briefly mentioned it earlier: it all started with more or less “accidental” org design jobs, where existing teams had to be restructured. In one project, for example, the task was to split up an existing role that had grown too large. So, we had to identify all individual tasks (aka roles) and rearrange them in a way that two or three people could work well together, each having a manageable and clearly defined scope of work.

In another case, it was about a new corporate strategy and how one department could implement the new goals in concrete terms. For that, existing team members had to form new working groups, each containing one representative from every “old” team.

I don’t know how you feel about this, but in such situations, companies typically start by making a PowerPoint presentation which is probably the least helpful way to create new structures :) I always preferred working with index cards on the floor — for people, roles, teams, etc. — or with tools like Miro, when working online.

This was great for experimenting and playing around, but shaping it into something the team and I could actually work with going forward was anything but easy. The index cards became increasingly crowded over time and were assigned to people, sometimes one card to multiple people, but not always the same ones. So you couldn’t just group cards together (see previous chapter: “The Problem with Org Charts”).

At that point, I started looking for online tools. But aside from tools designed to help teams implement specific ideologies (Agile or Holacracy), there wasn’t much out there. Some tools used a “circle” layout, which I found really impractical. First, circles take up a lot of space. And second, that doesn’t solve the problem of cards needing to exist in multiple circles.

So, together with a development team in India, I started building what you now see as the teamdecoder online app in your browser.