Elevating a Scale-up with Org Topologies

Management Summary 

Leaders set business objectives and define strategies to achieve them, yet often lack the tools to sustainably drive organizational performance. The good news is that this can be learned and thoughtfully applied today at organizations. Org Topologies (OT) will help you get the desired change going.

How do you define and successfully lead the change that’s right for your organization? Here’s a key point: Different goals—rapid delivery, global adaptability, resource optimization, or amplified innovation—require different and tailored org designs. As a leader, you can define that goal and use the approach offered here to evolve your organization in the chosen direction. 

Why does change fail so often? First, existing solutions may seem suitable when analyzed superficially, but, in fact, don’t fit your unique context. Second—an underappreciated factor behind failed change—people, when not owning the change ideas, won’t fully accept them and won’t go the extra mile to make them work. As a result, the promised benefits of change often remain unfulfilled despite all the wasted resources and opportunities.

This case study explains how applying Org Topologies ensured that a company was not spending money on a flawed transformation design and realized a sustainable performance boost in product development.

Strategic Org Design

What is Org Topologies?

Org Topologies (OT), being a strategic org design system, helps you align all the moving pieces so that your (1) business strategy, (2) organizational capabilities, and (3) change process work together cohesively to drive the desired organizational performance.

Why Use Org Topologies?

When organizations undergo transformations, choosing a framework like SAFe, Spotify, or LeSS alone may not be sufficient. OT helps identify if your new organizational design will genuinely solve the underlying issues or if it will fall short due to overlooked systemic challenges.

OT helps companies align their internal structures with business goals, resulting in a performance boost, measurable by faster innovation and efficient delivery of customer value.

Customer Case: Elevating GX

Customer profile: GX (anonymised for confidentiality purposes), is a scale-up in the EV charging market. They were founded in 2011 and provide an EV charging platform and empower the most ambitious players to meet EV charging demands. GX enables Charge Point Operators (CPOs) and eMobility Service Providers (eMSPs) to manage EV charging operations at scale, optimize revenue, extend network access, and offer outstanding driver experiences. 

The challenge at GX 

The business was growing fast, but the R&D department could not keep up with the growing demand for features. Although GX was the number one innovator in the EV charging market, they noticed that they were losing their pole position. Competitors were catching up in releasing new customer delighters. One of the observations was that GX’s speed of delivery of customer value was decreasing rapidly. Growing the number of R&D employees did not solve the problem. The time to market for customer requests increased from weeks to multiple months. 

GX management studied the possible causes for the declining delivery speed. Their R&D department consisted of 7 teams, each team responsible for one component of the complete GX solution. Their org design had grown organically over time, with its main driver being clearly defined component ownership by deep specialists. While growing from 8 to 50 people, the R&D group had turned into a collection of isolated silos. 

The managing directors agreed on the need to improve the organizational performance. They would need to restructure the processes of the teams at R&D. Middle management (Head of Engineering and Head of Product) were tasked to implement a change to solve the problems. 

The solution designed by GX

To solve the performance problem, middle management informed themselves on existing frameworks. Before any external consultant was approached, they crafted a custom org structure for the R&D department by themselves. They anticipated implementing key characteristics of the LeSS Framework: removing Product Managers at the team level in favor of three product areas, with each one having a single Product Owner and multiple teams. They designed the product areas by customer type. Each area should work as a team of cross-functional teams. They had designed a new Target Operating Model and were looking for external consultants to implement the TOM and support them in improving their scaled Scrum processes. 

Org Topologies

It seems GX had found/created a solution that needed no further discussion. However, a closer look at the TOM revealed that implementing it would not result in a sustainable change. 

Three observations led to this conclusion: 

1. The TOM design did not completely resolve the root cause of the long time to market.

2. The change was not systemic, meaning it focused only on restructuring R&D and did not consider other elements of the organizational design that influence organizational performance.

3. Top management was supportive, but not involved. 

To address these challenges, we used the Org Topologie MADE method (Map Assess, Design, and Elevate) as a guide in our consulting and coaching activities.

Map 

We used Org Topologies to map the existing design and assess the future TOM. OT Mapping entails determining the prevalent archetype of each org design unit (teams, managers, etc) involved in the value creation chain and plotting them on the OT map. 

Org Topologies mapping at GX, existing design

The current design shows a Head of Product (H) working at the whole business level. He works with eight Product Managers (items with a P on the map) who work at the capabilities level, each responsible for one team (items with a T on the map, one color representing one capability). 

Each team is locked to one component (capability) of the whole solution. And each team depended on (most of) the other teams to deliver customer value (depicted by the lines connecting the teams).

Assess

Assessing with the OT MADE Method consists of verifying if a design is fit for purpose. In this case, we asked ourselves if the new TOM GX was fit for purpose. Was the new org design the correct solution to achieve the GX business goals in their market? How well was the design understood, and how well did (upper) management know the change implications?

Each org design provides certain organizational capabilities. Org Topologies proposes three recognizable topologies: The Resource Topology, the Delivery Topology, and the Adaptive Topology. The business ambitions and market conditions determine which organizational capabilities most likely support achieving our goals. In the GX case, the market was uncharted, finding new innovative solutions to win customers and being fast in delivering known solutions were required. The Adaptive topology can provide this. 

Mapping the existing GX org design confirmed the root cause for slow value delivery: the dependencies between the teams caused hand-offs and coordination work. 

We mapped the TOM proposed by GX. In the new design, the Head of Product works with three Product Owners, each for a specific customer type. Each PO has a group of teams working at the feature capabilities level. 

Reducing the number of product managers and elevating them to manage three partial business areas was a great idea. However, having three product areas would not completely solve the inter-team dependency problem since product backlog items might span multiple areas. The middle managers acknowledged this problem, but this sub-optimal design was deemed to be a great improvement considering the component landscape they were coming from. Creating a single Backlog for the whole company was too big of a stretch for upper management at that moment in time.

Design

The Design phase explores options to consider which topology could best be implemented in which part of the business. 

Mapping and assessing the GX target design demonstrated that the proposed TOM was the Adaptive Topology. They designed three product areas containing cross-component and cross-functional teams that worked as a team of teams per business area. Each team had the capabilities of delivering end-to-end functionality at the business area level. Note that the colors of the three teams in the new design are similar, since their only level of specialization is the focus on their business area.   

Final design at GX

Understanding how the new TOM would or would not improve the performance before the change is implemented is a great win. Discussions showed there was insufficient understanding at GX of how the adaptive org design would work in practice and that it was unclear what was needed to elevate the existing org design to the new TOM. 

The Org Topologies mappings of the existing and proposed designs were extremely helpful in the sessions where we communicated the change with the development group. They had heard about the change initiative, but did not have a concrete idea of what the change would be like. Especially, the formation of new cross-functional teams was unknown to them. And yet, this was the most impactful change that would hit the teams. The mappings transparently explained that the existing component team ownership would be broken and replaced by end-to-end capable teams. Explaining the existing component team dynamics with the map, visualizing the inter-team dependencies, was a feast of recognition for the development group. Talking about expanding the mandate on skills and scope of work created the understanding of how to move forward to end their dependency hell.

Explaining the current and future situation using the map has become an ongoing activity. Learning simply takes time and repetition.

Elevate 

The last step in the MADE method is Elvate. The Elevating Katas answer the question “But how are we going to do it?”. It is a rich set of practices that bring the ongoing transformation effort into business as usual. 

We prepared the existing teams to be ready to work in the new business area team of teams. We flipped the organization in two days. We ensured everybody had time to work on the change preparations while the business as usual was going on before the flip. Time and effort were spent learning and preparing at the cost of a productivity loss. This is a necessary investment: slow down now to accelerate later. 

We applied the following Elevating Katas to enable the flip to the new design: 

• Single product backlog at the partial business level

• Elevate three team PMs to partial business POs

• Promote remaining team PMs to become product developers

• Self-design team workshop to create new teams per area

• Elevate the Definition of Done to the whole business level

• Practice multi-team product backlog refinement sessions

After the flip, the change work needed to continue using the Elevating Katas to execute smaller experiments to further improve the development system:

• Pair programming

• Mob programming

• Opening all repositories

• Communities of practice

• Code mentorship

• Integration test automation

• Architecture and knowledge sessions

The results

When the teams started working in the new setup, the performance increased dramatically. 

Happiness has gone up for almost all employees. However, some devs have difficulty accepting shared code ownership and broadening the mandate on the business domain. Some single-skill specialists struggled to find their new purpose outside of their comfort zone.

Initially, upper management was thinking lightly of the impact of the anticipated (process) changes in R&D. During the change process, they started seeing the impact of the transformation and the need for employee buy-in to embark on a never-ending journey of continuous improvement. They learned that all organizational elements needed to be aligned to sustain the change. They enjoyed the energy of the people crafting their journey within the boundaries set by management. The Sales and the Support departments were onboarded and included in the change, not only to manage their expectations, but also to involve them during refinements and Sprint Reviews.

The Map, Assess, Design, and Elevate steps brought the client from supporting the change initiative by funding it, to being involved by understanding the change. The MADE method revealed omissions in the target design and demonstrated the complexity of the change.. 

We used the OT mapping in various workshops to explain to the employees the current design and the new org design. The visualizations are a powerful means of communication to bring understanding of the why and what of the change. We emphasized that elevating a development group impacts how the company sells its product, hires new people, provides support, and manages its human capital. Org Topologies elevated managers and employees to become systems thinkers.