Barry - October 2024

One thing I’m proud of in our first few years is maintaining a strong “builder culture”, where we center and celebrate folks who are substantively moving the product and business forward. Our most venerated people are ICs who are building things.

Among the ways this is manifested is an opinionated approach to titles – in that we’ve worked hard to not have a lot of them. By keeping things simple, we can bring in incredible people and have them focus on outcomes, not climbing a semantic ladder or tacking a “senior” onto their business card.

Why?

The problem with titles is that they can be seen as an end in and of themselves, instead of a means to one.

People can fixate on them – they take up brainspace, and well-intentioned people can find themselves playing the game. They can trick “senior” people into thinking they always know best, and “junior” people to defer to nominal authority. Titles make organization and re-organization complicated, with arbitrary concerns over who can report to who.

We think these things are generally bad for creativity and growth and team functioning – and what titles we do have are used intentionally to create organizational legibility, not stroke egos or compensate or signify importance.

Titles shouldn’t give you authority or more clout than anyone else. The best ideas win, especially when they come from the most important and credible people in the company: the ICs who are building and selling our product.

Don’t get me wrong, we value and venerate Leads for the important work they do, but it’s just a different type of work and something they should be excited to do because of inherent interest and skill, not riches or glory. Their job is setting their teams up to do their best work!

Here’s what we do:

We keep it simple and flexible – similar to Square and Palantir:

• ICs have descriptive titles that indicate what they do. “Software Engineer”, “Mid Market Account Executive”, “Product Marketing Manager”, etc.
• Anyone managing other People are referred to as “Lead” (instead of “Manager”), e.g., “Enterprise Sales Lead” or “Product Design Lead”
• Leads looking after larger teams or entire departments can style themselves as “Head” or “VP” – but we’re not precious about this.

There’s a few other principles and corollaries:

• Someone promoted from IC→Lead should not experience a comp increase for that alone. Typically this means they move from Pn to Mn-1, which should be equivalent salary.
• People have in the past moved from Lead → IC which is completely cool, and even encouraged – builders rule!
• At no point should anyone mistake becoming a People Lead or having a “Head of” title with special privilege or access. We’re a “builder-first” culture now and always.

FAQ