Single-threaded teams (STTs) created enormous benefits at Amazon: speed, ownership, and accountability. But every org model optimizes for one set of benefits while sacrificing others. The downside of STTs is the loss of functional excellence. Here’s why:
In the most extreme example, a company that is strictly organized by STT means that there is no Chief Officer or org for functions like Technology, Product, Marketing, or Sales. Instead each team is lead by a GM whose team is comprised of people representing a variety of functions.
The problem with this model is that there is no GM in existence who has deep expertise in every function. Please let me know when you meet an MBA with deep marketing experience, a Masters in CS plus eight years of writing code, is a CPA who has run an accounting department, and has a JD, etc, etc.
So, how is a GM who is a Marketing expert supposed to coach and develop salespeople and software engineers? The answer is that they cannot possibly help their team members to master their respective functions.
At Amazon, we discovered that we needed to establish formal countermeasures to solve this problem.
We explicitly gave senior functional leaders responsibility to maintain standards. Most Vice Presidents at Amazon had a “second job” of establishing. and maintaining functional excellence beyond fulfilling their Single Threaded Leader (STL) role. For example, software engineering VPs set and managed company-wide standards specific to Software Engineering leveling, career-pathing, promotions, hiring, and code review standards. Retail VPs took on Subject Matter Expertise (SME) roles in areas such as our systems for buying and forecasting or cooperative Marketing.
The speed achieved through STTs is powerful, but it can’t be allowed to erode functional excellence. To build quickly AND well, there has to be a balance between the autonomy that promotes speed and the mechanisms that sustain excellence.
